One of the considerations for publishers of blogs is the amount of time it takes for the content on the blog to travel from your server to the user, who might be on the other side of the world, and then appear on the user's computer monitor. If the user connects to the internet through a traditional telephone modem, the time it takes for a blog to load on the monitor may be significant. With high speed internet connections, this is seldom an issue.

To help decrease the amount of time a blog takes to load, large picture files should be avoided. In fact, depending on the monitor of the end user and the resolution setting of that monitor, many of the pictures taken with todays inexpensive digital cameras will not even fit on the computer screen. Introducing the thumbnail! A thumbnail is a small version of a larger picture. The user can see the thumbnail and decide if s/he wants to take the time to see the larger picture. If yes, all the user must do is click on the thumbnail, and the larger picture appears usually in a new window.

I personally think it's always a good idea to use thumbnails. This post features an example of a thumbnail that is aligned to the left side of the post. Click on the thumbnail (which is only about 100 pixels wide) to see the larger version. Notice that it takes a little bit of time to download the larger image, which is a tiny file (only about 100 kilobytes in size, and measures about 750 pixels wide).