Older designers surely remember those times when you had to optimize almost all graphics on your site for dial up Internet connections. How about now? Do you even think about that when building a site?

Of course, but a lot depends on your target audience. Where I am, much of rural central Illinois still has dial up.

I still very much pay attention to page sizes and how fast things load, and you should too. Google also pays attention to how fast a website is.

In web hosting, you're dealing with a world wide market, so the smaller the page sizes, the faster it will be for other countries such as Australia, Germany, England, Canada, US, Mexico etc etc.. The further away someone is, the longer the page loads, so the smaller the better.

Also, if your host has not already enabled gzip compression, have them do it, it's a great piece of technology to help reduce page loading times too!

I still have the habit of compressing to the point where it does no visual damage, I still consider it necessary too. And you are right about Google, I haven't even thought of that.

using save to web in photoshop now to optimize my images. I make sure to compress all large jpeg images before uploading them. Also sometimes i will optimize png's

Agreed, I do it too. I also make sure to strip out the "meta-like" data from the image. Photoshop and Gimp can do this easily. It is unnecessary overhead. I try to get the images as small as possible in file size without degrading quality.

Compress your images with YSlow it's compressing the images more than the google tool.
And use if possible png files.

Or you can create a forwarder to a image hoster and upload your images there. abload.de is a very fast imagehoster but server location is germany.

I've heard quite a bit of suggestions to use png above all, but I've noticed png being about the same size as jpg and in some cases jpg was smaller than png.

So I'm not quite sold on png being the better format to use. The only benefit of using png I see, is the ability to use transparency in the image.

For quality and transparency, I would certainly choose png over gif.

Actually I don't worry about it any more. Not because of larger capacity of the internet and all of our connections but because the image software I use takes care of it without me noticing it.

PNG is a lossless file type. It doesn't have the compression artifacts that JPG does. It's a good inbetween for JPG and GIF though.

I wasn't a fan of PNG when it first became popular (I think we have too many file types already), but have since joined the PNG camp. It's nice to do minor edits to images and not have quality get sacrificed.

Google likes sites that loads fast .. so I think it's a good choise to use some sompression.

I think it depends on your audience as well. If you are dealing with a tech savvy group of users and your Analytics confirm this, then you might not have to worry so much about it from the user perspective.

That being said, you always want to worry about Google and everyone is right about Google liking quick loading sites.

Of course. For me it is still important to save files with saving their size. I prefer to save images as png, which have very good quality with small size. Sometimes I am using JPEG files... but as I said - I prefer png files.

I still*think about graphic sizes despite huge increases in bandwidth today. My standard resolution is 72dpi. Then I also make sure that the image has the exact width and height the way i want them to appear.

There are still dial-up connections to consider, that's true. But to me, the most formidable thing to consider is the patience of the surfer. The faster it loads the more you make the surfer smile.

That's very true. I'm the kind of person who yells at the computer when the page doesn't load very quickly, and I avoid slow-loading sites. I doubt I'm alone.