Web graphic elements have to be balanced with loading speed. The suggested load time (mid-2010) is now 2 to 3 seconds. Visitors are very impatient. Visitors have no tolerance for site bloat. If they can’t get past the loading time barrier, they will never see your beautiful design because they will bail out. Your blog took 10.5 seconds (USA cable highspeed) to load on my browser screen. I’ve seen worse!

With that said, here are “lightweight” non-fat graphic suggestions that help speed up pages and still maintain interest.

1. Color — HTML color is weightless. Leverage this whenever possible. Themes are created by color combinations. Themes create emotional reactions and can speed up understanding.

2. Natural or organic elements. On your blog, you have a rice paper background and flowing waves in the banner. These are good examples of organic elements. Basically, we are inviting the “outside” real world into our “structural, technical” offering. This makes for a more inviting site.

3. Lighting effects. These can be gradients, blurs, edges, shadows, etc that give the illusion of depth and lead the eye. Your wave header has depth illusion.

4. Legibility. Please google for the “100% Easy-to-read Standard”. Whenever possible type should not be “built images” but HTML fonts and larger.

5. Liquid or stretchy layouts. Not always possible with a blog template.

6. Optimize code with PHP-GZIP and optimize images with SmushIt Firefox addon. Your page is not using GZIP compression. I realize you may have no control over that.

For this site there are 3 heavy images:
1. logo.png 82K, using GIMP Save for Web addon, 8-bit PNG with transparency > 27K
2. wave2.png 70K, same treatment, > 29K
3. bkg2.jpg 72K, same treatment, JPEG 50% Quality output > 6.1K

Savings with image optimization:
Before = 224K
After = 62K
3.6 times faster image loading speed. This is 28% of your total 799K page weight and would give you a boost. The average page weight on the Internet is now 320K.

Thanks for the opportunity to share.

Thank God for those super talented ones. Always fun to visit their sites!

@Michelle: Yes, that red lantern is my blog’s signature. Hopefully that won’t limit my future designs. Thanks!

I used to love making new layouts for my site. I think I changed designs like once a month. I had a lot more free time in high school, lol. They were all just fun designs though with music and animations and, you know, they looked like a teenager did them. I think when you get older and you visitors get older, you and your audience have different expectations for design. It’s not as fun making layouts anymore because they need to be more mature layouts because I’m more mature and I want to reflect that in my design. And I think you reach a certain point where clean and simple is really the best way to go and there’s no point spending hours fiddling around in photoshop. A talented few can pull of gorgeous, graphic intense, yet clean and useful layouts. I am NOT one of these people, lol.

@JJ: Girl, you have one of the best designed blogs I’ve seen in my life! The watercolor and just how everything is put together is really unique. I guess the only element for long posts is readability… which reminds me. I’m reading this book called The Language of Thought by Steven Pinker and the text is so small, it’s actually discouraging me from reading it.

@TheBattleScene: Thanks for stopping by!

@Yolanda: Sounds good. Typography is key for sure. I’m trying to learn but I’ve quite developed the “eye” for it yet, shame. :’(

@Simply Precious: Man, I wanna see your professional work though!!!

Web designing-wise, I like simplicity, and functionality.

Personally, I prefer simplicity. I like colors to communicate a mood or make a bold statement, while playing with typography. I also like creating a successful visual hierarchy with colors and type.