How to Prepare Images for Your Web Site - Part 3Get Web Design Tips and Tricks on mps-web-design.com. How to Prepare Images for Your Web Site - Part 3 topic will increase your understanding on Web Design Tips and Tricks. We at mps-web-design.com only provide news, articles, information in Web Design Tips and Tricks. Web Design Tips and Tricks at mps-web-design.com provides the most up to date news and articles. If you have questions please do not hesitate to contact us.
Copyright 2002 Herman Drost Image optimization significantly improves your site's effectiveness. Whether your success is measured in revenue per user, page views, unique visitors, or pure profit, accelerating your Web site makes a huge difference. Part 1 of this article discussed when to use images for your web site and what image file formats to use on the Web (www.isitebuild.com/imageoptimization1). Part 2 discussed how to optimize your images for the Web. (www.isitebuild.com/imageoptimization2). Part 3 will present more ways to optimize your images so your web pages will be fast loading. Studies show that a one-second improvement reduces click-aways up to 65%. Faster page views means more page views and a better user experience. This leads to higher user retention and therefore more revenue. Here are a few ways this can be done: Creating Thumbnails Make 2 copies of your large image in your favorite image editing software (Fireworks or Photoshop). Make a small “thumb-sized” version of your large image and put it on your first page. Put the large version of your image on another page. Link the small image to the larger one. When visitors click on the small image it will take them immediately to the larger image. Pre-load graphics If you want a large image to load fast, you can pre-load the graphic on another page. Create a 1x by 1x pixel of the larger image and insert it at the bottom of an earlier page (it will appear as a dot and the visitor won't even know it is there). The browser caches the image. When the visitor arrives on the page with the large image, it appears almost immediately. Slicing This is where you divide a large graphic into smaller pieces. This keeps the file size of the images smaller enabling them to download faster. Slicing a graphic can also help with design and layout of your web site. Use Height and Width Attributes for your Images. The browser doesn't have to calculate the image size because you've told it the height and width values already. If the height and width attributes are not included, the browser has to load the entire image, then calculate its size before displaying it. Height and width attributes are inserted automatically in the HTML code by WYSIWYG page editors. Don't use the height and width attributes to make a graphic appear smaller on the page than its actual size; this just creates a larger download time plus added computer processing time. Resize the graphic in your image editing software instead and use it in your page at its true size. Interlacing Have you noticed web graphics appearing on the page gradually in layers? As each layer appears the image becomes clearer until it is in full focus. It gives the viewer a rough idea of what your image will look like and decide to wait or click onwards while the image is rendering. On a fast connection the image will load quickly, so you won't notice the rendering effect. Interlaced images increase file size slightly. Only apply it to large GIFs where the file size is less noticeable. Use of Alternate Text Some people surf the Web with the graphics turned off (for faster web page loading), or they are disabled (visually impaired people use the text-based Web). A good Web Designer will accommodate these situations by adding the ALT attribute to the HTML element. The ALT element allows you to put text in place of the image so the readers have an idea of what the image is without having to view it. The ALT attribute will show up if your image is broken. It can also be inserted as one of your keywords, for search engine optimization. Using the Gif Wizard This is a handy tool to reduce the file size of your graphics. If you go to www.gifwizard.com, it will compress your graphics online, on any platform. Optimizing your Web Site will deliver faster page downloads, increased page views, improved user retention, a better user experience and therefore more sales. ================================================== Herman Drost is a Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and author of iSiteBuild.com Low Cost Hosting and Site Design (http://www.isitebuild.com/sitehosting.htm) Subscribe to the “Marketing Tips” newsletter for more original articles. mailto: subscribe@isitebuild.com ==================================================
|
More Articles:1. Why You Should Hire a Professional Website Designer By Tami Jones Your web site should always adhere to standards!A professional web site designer will provide you with a standard compliant web site that is cross-browser supported.What does this mean to you? Why should you care? Any site that isn't standard compliant can "break" in older browsers, or simply not display at all in, say, text-based browsers. If you are a small business, this could be the difference between a conversion and a lost sale. That potential customer just went to your competition. … 2. The Importance of Having a Feedback Form in Your E-commerce Website By Ajay R Internet marketing is a different ball game altogether when compared to traditional marketing. A brick and mortar store employs salespersons to guide and advise its customers. No such equivalent of a salesperson exists for an online store. This could be one of the reasons why people shy away from online stores.Given these circumstances, it is of vital importance that your web store should be as interactive as possible. An interactive website makes your visitors feel more comfortable and increa… 3. XHTML- Kicking and Screaming into the Future By Eric Lester XHTML, the standard, was first released back in 2000. Roughly five years later we begin to see major websites revised to use this standard. Even the favorite whipping boy of standards-compliance punditry, Microsoft, presents their primary homepages, msn.com and microsoft.com in XHTML. Standards compliant XHTML sites are still the minority. The reason is simple. When the W3C released the new standard, the rest of the web running on HTML did not cease to function. Nor will the rest of the web, w… 4. How to Make the Online Sales Copy for Your Website More Conversational By Evelyn Lim It has been said that the best online sales copy is one that talks to your prospect as if you are in together in a conversation.But for some of my subscribers to my newsletter, they find it difficult to accomplish. They say that it is hard to “talk on paper”. How can this be? My guess is that the training in school did not provide much opportunity to practice on writing a conversational piece of work.Another guess is that there are tons of articles by copywriting experts on writing screaming… |
||||
