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I got an email to my MarkTiarra Photoshop Tips page today that goes like this:

-----Original Message-----

Um, just curious, why would have people do something so unmanageable as to chop images up to make individual sections hotlinks? You do realize that since html 1.0 there has been a thing called an image map. That is just ONE way that is much easier. *sigh* it is a real shame that people like myself have to go into a company and redo a website because the previous person didn't know what they were doing and followed some tutorials like this.

Please, for the children, re-think it.

----- My Response ------

On the surface it would seem that cutting a big JPG into parts would be a lot of extra work. But, I have done over 2700 sites since 1996 now and a good lot of them have been in the adult space where conversion from visitor to sale is closely watched. I have volumes of data on everything from color combinations to picture types and load times as to what makes the difference between 1 in 1000 people buying and 1 in 500. And when you're getting 100,000 visitors per day that is a VERY important number.

That said, the are several advantages to cutting images up that have been proven time and time again (so much so that I have the only design company in my industry that GUARANTEES sales):

1) Total load time is paramount and some areas compress to gif much better than they do to jpg in some designs. It is best to get the mix of both for the lowest total KB size on the page.

2) Having images load in parallel rather than one huge one coming down decreases the number of aborted visits greatly.

3) Often certain elements in the design need to have hot swappable graphics, insertable Iframes, and/or editable HTML text. The only way to break up a beautiful Photoshop design to allow for these various elements is through cuts. Finally,

4) Those nice little mouse over effects that occasionally help sales work much better when each menu item is a preloaded graphic. Most people wouldn't even know how to code an image map with mouse-overs.

Hopefully that all made sense. I certainly understand what you are saying and I feel your pain (having to edit Front Page designs make me want to cry!) but there are very well tested reasons for doing things the way presented.

Best regards,
Mark T.

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Am I missing anything or does that make sense?