Did you know that a large portion of the web's population is still running on dial up connections? As of July 2008, 25% of homes in the U.S. that subscribe to some type of Internet service provider are still using dial up.
It is therefore unwise to count these users out of the equation when you're designing your website! Making your website load fast is still an effective tactic to maximizing your exposure to the largest audience of people.
Ususally, the text on your website is loaded in a very short time, even on a dial up connection. Large images and photos are typically the culprit of slow-loading websites. What you want to do, therefore, is strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site.
Compress and Optimize Your Images
Your nest step is to optimize every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. You'll need to use image editing software such as Photoshop or Fireworks to remove "unnecessary" information in your images, which effectively reduces the file size of your image without affecting its appearance too much.
If you own Photoshop, when you save an image as a JPEG file, you will notice that a dialog box appears which lets you choose the "quality" of the JPEG image. Normally, a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough to preserve the quality of your image while reducing its file size. If you do not have Photoshop, you can search for freeware or shareware image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image's file size.
The Alphabet Soup of Graphic Formats: GIF, JPEG, or PNG?
Choose the GIF format for graphics with lots of solid colors and lines (for instance, clip art graphics and graphics with lots of text). In the GIF format, your image editing software clips away all the color information that is not being used in your image, giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format can compromise the appearance of your image, so do a quick comparison with JPEG to see which one looks best and yields the best file size.
Choose the JPEG format for photos and graphics with photographic elements embedded within them. This format does the best job of compressing realistic photography and keeping the file sizes low.
To optimize your images and photos, you may save your images in the web-friendly PNG format to achieve a combination of high quality compression and smallest file size.
To get started, try compressing your image/graphic in all of the three types of formats and see which one looks the best and offers the optimum file size.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
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