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Most surfers agree…speed is extremely important on the internet. More than 60% of internet users consider the biggest problem of the internet to be websites that take too long to download (GVU 10th internet survey). Check your own site's statistics. Do you have a high percentage of visitors who "didn't stay"? Chances are they left before even seeing your site…they didn 't have the patience to wait for your painstakingly designed web pages to download.
Graphics are your number one traffic-killer when it comes to website speed. The higher the byte size of your images, the slower your website will download. As a graphic artist turned website developer, I'm constantly fighting the urge to create artsy graphic-laden sites for my clients—but it just doesn't matter how beautiful my web pages are if nobody waits around to see them! By all means use graphics to entice your viewer and showcase your product but make sure your graphics are as fast as they can possibly be. I try to keep my images no larger than 20 kilobytes and the smaller the better. If possible, I love to get my images down to 3 to 5 kilobytes because then they load almost as fast as text. Remember two things for fast graphics: color and size. Color--Fewer is Faster Fewer colors equals faster graphics and this starts with your graphic program. If you're designing in Photoshop, never use the default setting to export your image to .gif format…it defaults at 256 colors. Use the "adaptive" setting and preview the image to export the .gif with as few colors as necessary. Other design programs will convert your images to .gifs differently—the key is to always be conscious of colors and use as few as possible to still retain a good image. Also, make your images seem faster by saving them as interlaced images so the viewer will at least see something other than an empty box during download time. Speaking of empty boxes, always include alternative text for your images too so that the viewer will know what's coming and need not wait before moving on to different pages in your site. Size Does Matter The larger the size (height and width) of your graphic the larger the byte size. Never upload a large image and then reduce it to the correct size for your page; it maintains the byte size for the larger image. Determine the necessary dimensions for your web page and save your image as a .gif at those dimensions before you upload it to your site. If you want a large graphic on a page, try slicing it up into smaller images and putting it in a table for a faster download. Don't know how to slice an image? There's a great little free program called the Shoestring Dicer that will do it for you. You can download it at http://www.ziplink.net/~shoestring/dicer01.htm . |
| Article by Blue Tapp, owner of Blue's ArtHouse. Blue Tapp has been designing professional computer graphics for over a decade and began designing websites two years ago. Her company, Blue's ArtHouse, specializes in professional computer graphics, website development, internet research and internet marketing and also offers free online resources for website development, internet marketing and search engine registration. |