Optimizing graphics for better performance on your affordable web site design.

If you optimize your web page images it will increase the speed of your affordable web site design, the advantage with doing this is that you will decrease download time without compromising image quality. However there are some aspects you have to keep in mind while optimizing images. Each site is different from the other and the best way to find the correct size which will optimize your images is experimentation. Once you find the right size it will better the performance of your affordable web site design.

Compressing or resizing usually means making the file smaller, which will make your site load much faster. Your objective should be to end up with an image that is compressed, good looking, and one that takes less storage place, all in one. If your image is over 50kb, you should consider making it smaller. However if it is over 1mb, you should definitely resize the image.

On the web we do not use standard instruments of measurements like inches and centimeters. Instead of that ‘pixels’ are used for measurement. The next thing to know is what screen resolution is your affordable web site design created for. Previously websites were designed for a 640x480 resolution, but that is a rare case in today’s world. Today web pages are created for an 800x600 or 1024x768 resolution.

Every image format has three letter extensions like BMP, JPG, .GIF and more recently PNG. The most common among these are BMP files. However, they are usually very huge and take a lot of time to download and need to be further optimized. The new PNG files are the recent ones to come on the Internet and are unusually flexible. They can be easily optimized and at the same time show excellent quality.

JPG are normally used for high quality images because they are better at retaining subtle color changes such as gradients and large sums of color. These files are used when it is necessary for you to preserve the quality in your image. Generally JPGs are larger than gif files because they compress at a color bit rate. GIF files are always compressed. They can be compressed using 128 or 256 colors or even by using a full range of colors. Naturally the more colors you will use the larger the file will be. The single most advantageous feature of GIF files is the fact that they support images with a transparent background while JPG files cannot.

So, which programs do we use to resize or compress the images on your affordable web site design? Here are a few helpful programs.

1. Photoshop – Using this you can resize the images individually after exporting them as a GIF. You can even compress JPG files. If you use this program you have to be careful about choosing your color settings. The same applies to JPG files. Be sure to use the bar selector to decide on how much compression the image should get. 80 is the usual in a JPG and it works. But if you have a large number of images to work avoid using this method, as you will have to work on each image individually, which will be wastage of time.

2. Windows XP – It provides an inbuilt resizing tool. You can access it by browsing to where you have your images stored and selecting the image Right click on the image and select 'resize image'. After that you will work with a utility wizard, which will provide you with options on how you want your image resized.

3. Dreamweaver – The early version of Dreamweaver came with a utility called ‘create web photo album’. This was an option under the ‘commands’ menu. It was used to compress images. However a better option for the same job is ‘Macromedia Web Photo Album 2.1’. To use this program you have to simply install and run it. Once you install Macromedia, you just have to activate the wizard and compress the file, by choosing one of the many options given, which suits you.

Back