Thursday, April 9, 2009

Optimize Your Graphics

Graphics applications Use .jpeg and .gif graphics for your images. These are the two file formats universally used on the web basically because they take up less space without much loss of quality. Optimization is where an image is reduced to its smallest file size while retaining its best quality.A basic rule of thumb is save the images in .jpeg format for photos and use the .gif format for your logos, and other graphics.

Understanding the difference in how these file formats compress an image is important in designing good web pages. The second thing to remember is that the larger an image is the more KB it will take up, so don't fill your page with photos that are 600 x 480 pixels that take up the whole screen and most visitors will not wait for such large graphics to download anything over 30 KB takes too long.

However we need to remember that you can make a large GIF take up only a few KB by using one or two colors useful for backgrounds. Finally remember there is no point in including unnecessary graphics on your page - they only take up space. Don't waste space with Java applets or animated GIFs just because you want to show off some cool new effect unless the graphics will really make your site sticky.

Make sure that the buttons or links to your pages are obvious. It is a good idea to also have text links to your web pages as well as buttons, for example at the bottom of each page. This is because some people disable images so that they can browse faster, and more importantly, some search engines do not follow hyperlinks from images, so when they spider your site, they will not pick up the linked pages.

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