When you create a great Web page, the first thing that people will notice is if the page loads quickly or slowly. The simplest way to make sure that your page loads quickly is to create small images.
There are three ways to make sure that your images are small and download fast.
- Keep the dimensions small - crop your images
Professional photographers learn to take photos of exactly what they want in the shot, with no wasted space. However, it is very common to see a scanned photo on the Web with one person and a huge expanse of nothing all around them. This makes for an unnecessarily large photo.
For example:
The first photo of raccoons swarming into our campsite have a lot of additional scenery around them that doesn't need to be there. If this were a print photo there would be nothing I could do except wish that I was a better photographer under pressure (there were a lot more than three around...). But with a graphics program only the raccoons need to be in the photo (as in the second photo).
- Use as few colors as possible
When you create GIF images, you are given the choice of what palette to save with your images. Most people are aware of the Web palette, but what you may not realize is that if you have a three color image, you are saving 213 additional colors in your palette that your image does not use. This can add additional space.
The best way to get around this is to convert your GIF images to the Web palette and then convert them again to the exact palette of the image. This way you will be sure that your image is browser safe, and only uses the minimum number of colors.
- Put your images through an optimization program
If you don't have the time or inclination to optimize your images, don't worry about it too much, as there are many companies and programs that will do it for you.
If you are looking for software for your computer, then Squeeze Your Graphics is a great reference source.
You can find out more about speed and optimizing your Web pages in my article on Web optimization or my Speed links.
