By Sandor Panton, Contributor
FOR SOME web surfers, a website is impressive, not because of its content, but because of how it looks.
Without graphics, a web page simply looks boring. It may be well written and full of interesting content, but despite this, it's the aesthetic appeal of a web site that often gives visitors their first and possibly most lasting impression. However, too heavy or too many graphics can make a site sluggish and painfully slow to display, with the end result being that some surfers become impatient with its load speed and do not bother to stick around for it to finish displaying.
It's often a delicate balancing act for web site designers, as they try to create sites with amazing graphics to impress visitors on one hand, and sites that display quickly on the other hand. Most successful websites enjoy the best of both worlds and good web designers know and understand the importance of optimising their site's graphics.
Simply resizing or placing image size tags in a web page's html code will not reduce the overall download size of graphics. Instead, there is web graphic optimisation the process of reducing an image to the smallest file size possible at an acceptable image quality.
Here are a few optimisation tips.
THE RIGHT TOOLS
Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Fireworks are two of the better and more commonly used image-editing software. There are a few others, but these two are highly recommended by many graphic artists and web page developers, especially since the newer versions come with numerous options to assist in optimising graphics specifically for web pages.
THE CORRECT FILE FORMAT
Jpeg and gif are the two most commonly used file formats for saving web graphics. It's important to know when to use which, simply because saving an image using the wrong type of format will most likely render a heavy web graphic. Use jpegs for photos (for example, pictures taken with a digital camera or scanned to your hard drive) and gifs for clip art or drawings (images that have large expanses of the same colour).
BREAKING UP OR SLICING IMAGES
It's recommended that you break-up or slice larger images into pieces, using tables and/or layers to bring them together as one complete image when the web page is done loading. Doing this does not necessarily reduce the overall size of the image, but it allows the surfer to view individual parts of the image as it loads, instead of having to sit and wait on a single large graphic to load.
IMAGE RESOLUTION
The higher the resolution of a graphic, the larger its actual size (weight) will be. Web graphics with a resolution greater than 72 dpi (dots per inch) will not necessarily provide additional display quality or clarity, but will definitely weigh more. So if you've scanned or edited images at a higher resolution (100 300 dpi), it would help to reduce them to 72 dpi.
Sandor Panton is an Internet specialist and consultant. If you have any comment, contact him at feedbackjamaica-gleaner.com. This series is brought to you by www.go-jamaica.com, the portal website of the Jamaica Gleaner.
