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| Reducing Load Time Through Image Optimization |
| by: Colin Stables |
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Even though more and more Internet users switch to
broadband every year, a large portion of the web
's population is still running on good old dialup
connections. It is therefore unwise to count them
out of the equation when you're designing your
website, and a very major consideration we have
to make for dialup users is the loading time of
your website.
Generally, all the text on your website will be
loaded in a very short time even on a dialup
connection. The culprit of slow-loading sites is
mainly large images on your website, and it is
very important to 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.
You should also go to a greater length and
optimize every image on your site to make sure it
loads in the least time possible. What I really
mean is to use image editing software to remove
unnecessary information on your images, and
thereby effectively reducing the file size of
your image without affecting its appearance.
If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you
that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a
dialog box appears and lets you choose the
"quality" of the JPEG image -- normally a setting
of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will preserve the
quality of your image while saving it at a small
file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there
are many free image compressors online that you
can download and use to reduce your image's file
size.
On the other hand, you can opt to save your images
in PNG format to get the best quality at the
least file size. You can also save your images in
GIF format -- the image editing software clips
away all the colour information not used in your
image, hence giving you the smallest file size
possible. However, saving in GIF format will
often compromise the appearance of your image. |
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This article was posted on June 26, 2007
and reads 12 times. |
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