Ive noticed lots of sites recently having lots of large images on a site - is this an issue with loading times, or is it not much of a concern in this day and age? Im talking about sites which have an image covering the whole background, rather than a repeated pattern 5px square, or large images as navbar buttons rather than html/CSS colouring etc. Im still new to web design and trying to get my head around best practices when using images in this kind of way.

Ive noticed lots of sites recently having lots of large images on a site - is this an issue with loading times, or is it not much of a concern in this day and age? Im talking about sites which have an image covering the whole background, rather than a repeated pattern 5px square, or large images as navbar buttons rather than html/CSS colouring etc. Im still new to web design and trying to get my head around best practices when using images in this kind of way.

there are various ways you can cut down on image size and loading time.

 

A start is to use Image sprites, you can take it to the extreme (as a coleague of mine did recently) and put every image into one big image, the HTTP requests are obviously a lot less and the overall image size is also less.

 

The quality and file type which you save an image as is also important. using jpg's is pretty standard and depending on the quality the file size is decent.

 

And last but not least the speed at which internet has growen is huge, and thus most people aren't on dial up anymore.