Nowadays Internet users switch to broadband every year, still there is a large portion on the net that still uses the good old dial-up connections. It is therefore unwise to count them out of the equation when you’re designing your website weather it is personal or business, and a major consideration you have to make for dialup users is the loading time of your website.
Your Website’s text content will always load faster than the other elements on the page. The main reason most of the websites are slow contribute to having images with large file sizes, and it is very important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your visitors and not to bog down the overall loading time.
You must always have to keep in mind to optimize every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. What I really mean is to use an image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its appearance.
Image editing applications
If you are serious about image optimization, Photoshop is one of the easiest and most powerfull graphic editing programs out there. If you never used Photoshop, you can download a fully functional trial copy today from adobe.com and try it yourself. If you do not like Photoshop, there are lots of other freee graphic editing applications that you can use.
Correct image formats
There are various images formats on the web that you can use. You need to figure out when to use each format to get the best possible results for the situation.
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)
For pictures/photos always use JPEG as the compression method. JPEG works very well with images with thousands or millions of colors. In Photoshop 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. Again this setting will be totally different for you with your picture. When you select the compression setting, Photoshop will show you a live preview of the image with the compression applied, so you can judge yourself what is the correct setting that suits you.
GIF (Graphics Interchange Format)
For buttons, site navigation, arrows, backgrounds, some headers that do not use lot of colors, it is advised to use GIF format. Do not use JPEG for this kind of images. GIF compression tend to compress image files with less colors more efficiently than JPEG by clipping away all the color information not used in the image.
PNG (Portable Network Graphics)
On the other hand, you can opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality at the least file size. This is still a new format on the web, although it’s been out there for a years now.
The main reason you don’t see many PNG formats on websites is due to computability issues with different browsers with various platforms. Most modern web browsers support PNG, but older versions remain unsupported.
I hope this basic guide to image optimization help with your next web project on choosing the correct format.
