Hi Meg,

I appreciate your frustration, and there have been times I wished I had
never started building my own site. I had no idea how much was involved, and
how different it would be than desktop publishing. With that said, I
wouldn't give up now.

Your main issue with publishing your site and with it then loading so slowly
in a browser does seem to be associated with your image sizes. And yes,
learning how to resample, reduce the size and optimize your images for the
web is a bit of a challenge, but is essential, especially when you design a
site that is dependent upon those images.

It isn't that hard to edit images. While Photoshop Elements is a great
program for the price, and makes the job of optimizing images a bit easier,
it isn't that hard in Irfanview. Download and install it, and read the
instructions under Help for resizing and/or resampling pictures. The basic
process is then to go to File > Open and browse to and open the image that
you want to edit. Then go to Image > Resize/Resample and you will see a
dialogue window. Then look at the size of the picture box on your Publisher
document, and if you need say a picture that is about 280 pixels wide, then
under Set New Size type in 280 in the width and the length will
automatically reduce proportionally if you have the Preserve aspect ratio
box checked. You do not need to be exact, but try to stay within 10% of the
final size you want to use in Publisher. So resizing the picture to 300
pixels wide and then reducing the size of the picture box in Publisher will
work just fine, but I would avoid making it much bigger or you will end up
with distorted images. Click OK and the picture will resize. At the bottom
you will see how much the image has been reduced. I just did a sample where
the original was 1.81 MB and it reduced to 172 KB, which is still too large
in my opinion. But then when you go to Save As and choose to save as a JPG,
a JPEG/GIF Save Options dialogue window appears. Under quality, slide it to
about 50, and save. I usually save the file under the same name with the
width, such as 'image.jpg' as 'image-280.jpg' so I can easily discern which
one I want to insert into Publisher later. The result is a 280 pixel wide
image that has been reduced from 1.81 MB to 14 KB...which one do you think
will load faster?

You can experiment around with Size method on the Resize/Resample image
dialogue box and then the quality on the Save Options dialogue window until
you get an image that both is small in size, but still looks good to you
after inserting into your Pub file. Once you figure these settings out for
one picture, it is easy to do others as the only thing you vary is the width
of the picture.

Now, lesson over, and your homework is to resize and resample the images on
your website, and get the new, improved fast loading pages uploaded <grin>.
Good luck.

DavidF