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Friday, April 1, 2011

Image Optimization - Reducing Your Load Time

By Alison Heath


Every year, more and more users switch to broadband every year but even so, a large portion of the web's population is still running on good old dialup connections. Counting them out of the equation is therefore unwise when you're designing your own website and we have to make a major consideration for dialup users which is the loading time of your website.

In a very short time, all the text on your website will be loaded even if it's 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.

To make sure that it loads in the least time possible, what you should do is go to a greater length and optimize every image on your site. You can effectively reduce the file size of your image without affecting its appearance because this would mean using image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images.

If you have Photoshop, then when you save an image as a JPEG file, it will be obvious to you that a dialog box appears and lets you choose the quality of the JPEG image and the normally a good enough setting is 8 to 10 because it will preserve the quality of your image and save it all at a small file size at the same time. If you want to reduce the file size of your image but you don't have Photoshop, don't worry because there are still many free image compressor which you can check out online and download.

Another thing you can do is opt to save your images in PNG format in order to get the best quality at the best file size. You can also save your images in GIF format and you'll be given the smallest file size possible because the image editing software will clip away all the color information not used in your image. However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely!




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