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. It's 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 because the culprit of sites that are slow to load are mainly large images on your website.
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 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. But even if you don't have Photoshop, there are still many free image compressors online which you can download and use in order for the file size of your image to be reduced.
To get the best quality at the best file size, another thing you can do is opt to save your images in PNG format. Saving your images in GIF format is also possible since the image editing software would clip away all the color information that are not used in your image and so you'll be given the smallest file size possible. But make your choice wisely since saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image.
Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection. It's 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 because the culprit of sites that are slow to load are mainly large images on your website.
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 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. But even if you don't have Photoshop, there are still many free image compressors online which you can download and use in order for the file size of your image to be reduced.
To get the best quality at the best file size, another thing you can do is opt to save your images in PNG format. Saving your images in GIF format is also possible since the image editing software would clip away all the color information that are not used in your image and so you'll be given the smallest file size possible. But make your choice wisely since saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image.
About the Author:
Wouldn't it be fun to shop and eat on someone else's dime. Learn more about the perks of mystery shopper jobs. Real shopping jobs opportunities do exist!
No comments:
Post a Comment