Is there a reason my background often takes a very long time to load or many times doesn't?

If anyone could check it out and tell me possibly what might be wrong, that would be cool, or just see if it loads and how long it takes so I can gauge the success rate of it actually loading on different people's computers.

Thanks!

Sure. If we could have the URL...?

wow. I'm awesomely smart.

http://www.thehodapp.comlu.com/

Whoa! That's slow. Well, the image is huge. 756 kB. You can't have such a large background image.

You can see it's as slow if accessed directly.
http://www.thehodapp.comlu.com/images/apop...background3.png

AHHH I see....What should I do to make it smaller? I used GIMP to make it and that's the most compression I could do with png...It needs to be transparent...should I make it a low quality GIF?

A GIF (or 256 color PNG) would be a lot smaller, but still largish because the image is so big (width and height).

hmm I see. Well I'm not digging the large file size, but I do want a background that isn't too repetitive, yet still looks cool...Is there some way to do that with what I have?

If I make it smaller and tile it, it would be a little goofy looking I think, so I'm not sure what I could do...

Thanks for all the help!

You say it needs to be "transparent", but there is nothing "behind" the background, so it makes no sense to be transparent. Therefore you can just use a jpeg image, which will compress blurry text nicely.

Well, there is a black background color on the page, so the image would have to be redone on a black background. If there are any shifts in the black in the JPG, that could make it less seemless. But if you have the original so it's easy to change background color, give it a go.

Oh, right, I hadn't thought of that. (So I was wrong: there _would_ be a point in having a transparent image _if_ the background colour were variable. But it isn't in this case, so there isn't.)

Even if you don't have the "original" image, all you need to do is capture the screen background, and save it as a jpeg.

Excellent! Thanks very much...I DO have the original (I made it) so I should be able to do that easily.