How big should the filesize be?

[monkeychoo]

Im starting my own ecommerce site which contains about 400 images, half of them thumbnails and half larger close up images. My question is about when I optimise them to save for the web: what is the maximum filesize that I should save them as, so they dont take too long downloading. A friend told me they shouldn't be any larger than 8kb (and that the entire site shouldnt take up more than 60kb in total), but at that size the images just look shoddy! Help!

[WoWo]

The 60k is possibly the maximum page size.

[kingbob]

have you tryed using PNG file format and editing them in adobe photoshop or fire works i bet you could get them down to 2k each and still look good

[kingbob]

i am trying to get a portfolio togther of my graphic design stuff but i have only done work for 3 different web site so i am looking for more stuff to do, if you need any help, i am offering my services for free

[monkeychoo]

Thanks guys, those answers were defniately helpful. Thankyou for your offer kingbob - I would be very grateful for any help you have to offer. Its a bit complicated though - Im using an ecommerce solution called eshox which gives you a basic template for an online store but you just change the variables - images, web template etc. Im new at this so Im not sure how it would work, let me know what you think - if its too complicated Ill be looking to upgrade from eshox in a few months and get a site built professionally and would love someone else to design it for me.

[kingbob]

I think EShox is a type of CSS style sheet, these use div tags to set variables within the sheet, to find out more about html tag, SAMS do a good book learn HTML XML in 24 hours. the first web site i did the graphics for was done with CSS style sheets, http://crm.mailcustodian.co.uk  [Email address removed as per site policy. - AB Editor]

[thecooler]

You should keep the size of thumbnails small, but you can link them to full size images that can be as large as you wish. Each page should be kept small for fast loading, but the whole site can be any size. Some sites are huge if they have a lot of pages and content.

[MiloTheGreat]

I would tackle a different way. Why duplicate you images, one original, one thumbnail, one macro. Just upload the one and created (and cache) the two others when their used. Plenty on examples in google. I've written plenty of these to good results.