I confess, I generally prefer templates that make heavy use of graphics; my theory is that I want my forums to be kind of an immersive experience. I'd like to get the user away from their everyday experience of web forms and text-filled boxes and into an attractive environment. I do also offer a template that goes easy on the images, though, and many people prefer it. What's your style?
Before I worked with Andrew Gallant my templates were graphical beyond belief. If you were a dialup user there was no point in visiting my site. Nowadays, I keep my styles simple, hassle free when the vbulletin updates come (and they do come in abundance). I hate updating my templates when the vbulletin updates come so I try to keep my styles minimalistic in all areas.
Fast Loading and easy to look at. Really if a site takes more than 10 seconds to load on my computer than I have lost interest. Those are my only gauges. If the site is hard to navigate because of imagery, then it is also a turn off. Here is a site that takes about 4 seconds to load on my computer - Matt Mullenweg — aka Photo Matt — on WordPress, Web, Jazz, Life, and Photography I find it to be visually appealing and a good use of design elements. The Ice Cream and Petit Chic forums in Soliloquay's signature are also nicely done. On the other hand, I personally find that Setsou Design is difficult to navigate and takes too long to load on my PC. A combination of the choice of fonts, the dark background and gray text, having the basic navigation a seemingly long distance away from the rest of the site just doesn't suit me. I can't even read "Hello Guest -> Login | Register" unless I get right up to my monitor or zoom the page. Well that and it takes longer than 10 seconds to load. I can download a lot in 10 seconds. That is 5 songs off of iTunes with my connection.
Stylishly simple, fast loading. I remember what it was like to be a dial-up internet user. 10 seconds max for a page to load, any more than that, and that site has lost me.
Oh, I try not to be totally insensitive to the needs of my dialup users, even in the graphical templates; I prefer vector graphics with minimal gradients, and always strive for the smallest file size without sacrificing image quality.
Still, the more images that have to load, regardless of file size, the slower the page load is going to be.
As Peggy said, its not just the size of the image. Its the number of images and connections that must be made to your server along with the size of the downloads. By default a browser will make up to four connections to you server to download items. Each image, javascript file, CSS and the HTML require their own connection and this creates overhead. This is where latency comes in. The average ping rate for a dialup user is about 250 milliseconds. That means every connection for something on your site has a quarter second of latency. Forty items on a page gives a dial-up user up to 10 seconds of latency alone. This doesn't even account for downloading anything. Your Ice Cream forum has 37 items downloaded for the first page. For me it loads in 3.1 seconds including latency. My latency to your site is 51 milliseconds. Total page load is 171 Kilobytes. That would be about 15-20 seconds on dialup roughly. Of course Dialup users should realize that things are going to load slower. I'd hate to use Facebook on Dialup. Your Ice Cream forum is very light on graphics as well. Now browsers try to compensate for this by caching items for reuse but they still have to contact the server for each item to see if it has changed. Which site do you use SVG based images on? That is the only vector format that is supported by web browsers that I am aware of. I would like to see your work.
Sorry Wayne Luke, I meant vector graphics in the sense of the original file format, as shorthand for "gifs with large areas of solid color". I did not realize I was implying they were SVG (although I'm interested in them too)
I like sites that a lean, very lean with all of the fat and bloat trimmed off. I want the site to load in seconds, not minutes. Themes that use a lot of heavy graphics are a turn off. The bigger the theme, the less I visit that site.
