Since a couple of weeks live.com started presenting their user with beautifully crafted start pages that show very nice photos as page background (unfortunately at this time only available in the US).

To celebrate the Olympics, the backgrounds now show pictures from the games and below you can see a couple of samples.

The very smart thing about this is that the images don’t actually slow down the initial load of the page (which is a key metric in the effectiveness of a search start page and one of the main driver of a positive user experience) but it gets loaded on the background (unless of course the user already moved away). There is also a fade effect which adds to the overall sensation of care in how the page has been set up.

I really like this and hope that it will be soon available worldwide.