Animated Gif / Hosting Loading Question (-Help Needed-)

[FightFan.com]

Hello,

We run a boxing website and have an animated gif on our page. It's a great feature that our visitors enjoy, but it's quite problematic in load time which effects our alexa rating as well as causes a delay in load time for various people around the globe.

You can see it on the left side of the site:

http://fightfan.com/

What I'm wondering is if we can do something like make it only play if someone's cursor rolls over it?

Ideally we need it NOT to load when someone brings up our page unless they specificly click on it or roll over it.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers!

[hewligan]

GIFs really aren't a good way to display video - even very short pieces like that. You'd probably be better off displaying it using Flash. That would also give you the option of setting it not to load/play unless requested.

[DesignVHL]

Agreed! This could easily be done with flash. It will function as you need it to, be smaller in file size, and be of a much higher quality visually.

[FightFan.com]

Thanks for the advice.

I will look in to the process you call "flash".

:)

[DesignVHL]

process? well, flash is basically more of a technology or format, more than a process. :) Learn more about flash here:

www.adobe.com/flash (http://www.adobe.com/flash)

www.flashkit.com (http://www.flashkit.com)

www.gotoandlearn.com (http://www.gotoandlearn.com)

www.lynda.com (http://www.lynda.com) (has some great learning video tutorials)


*Honestly, one of us here could do it for you for pretty reasonable in price - if you want, you can post in the classified section, and quite a few of us will probably want to offer you a quote. It shouldn't take anymore than an hour or two to do this. :) Just an idea...faster and better than learning flash - which has a slight learning curve to it, and you have to buy the program. Many of us already own it).

[shalom_m]

There are two major problems that affect the speed of your page:

The site is written with Wordpress. As with every kind of generated code, it is based upon building blocks. Sometimes you may not need the whole block - just a line or two of it - but the generator will put the whole block in for you.
Your page is far to long, consider breaking it up into 3-4 seperate pages. Then they will load much faster. You may even be able to live with that, if your page is of some reasonable length.As far as the GIF is concerned, I have reduced the number of colors to 64. This is good enough to render a clear animated picture and reduced the size by nearly 30%.

http://mandelbaumonline.net/csspop/featuredclip2.gif

Feel free to copy.

[FightFan.com]

That you all for the advice. We just put the site up with the worpress engine and are still tweaking many things. We do have someone who is proficiant in flash, we had just never got around to discussing the gif's formatting until recently.

Will take the advice above into account. Much appreciated.

Cheers