Faster downloads through image optimization
November 9th, 2009

Today all over the world broadband internet is spreading at all times. But even then there are still a significant amount of internet users who surf on dial-up networks. Hence it is very important to consider them while designing your websites. So when you do consider these users, you have to consider another aspect of your website: Download time.

If you have a good old text website then there is nothing to worry about, since these websites do load very fast. But nowadays you hardly get text only websites. Some amount of graphics and images will be included on some of your pages. This is exactly where you have to be careful. Large images and graphics tend to slow the download time of your websites since there is usually a lot of information associated with them. Information like various shades of color usually takes lot of time to calculate and hence websites with heavy images load slowly. Hence it is very important to strike a balance between using a few images to spice up your website as opposed to using a lot of images which will slow down your website.

To enhance download times, you should consider optimizing either all your images or at least the ones which are very heavy. When you optimize your images the file size gets reduced. The best way to do this is by using a graphic or image editing software which strips out unnecessary information on your images without affecting their quality.

The best professional program for this purpose which comes to mind is Adobe Photoshop. In Photoshop you have several options of saving an image in various file formats. You can save it as either a JPEG, PNG or GIF. If it is a photograph, there is an option for saving it as a JPEG for the web. You can also adjust the quality of the image while saving it in this format, so that it reduces the file size without greatly affecting the quality. The JPEG format is used for saving photos.

For graphics other than photos, there are other formats such as PNG and GIF. The PNG format is very popular for saving images which can later be used in flash animations. In the PNG format you can get the best quality at the lowest file size. Hence it comes in handy with flash animations where you have to consider several graphics in a single animation.

Similarly we also have the GIF format. This is mainly used to save graphics for simple GIF animations. This format uses a palatte of 256 colors. And because of this limitation it is unsuitable for photos, but is a great format for saving general graphics and especially GIF animations.

Thus these image editing programs really come in handy while reducing file size of images. Besides Photoshop there are other image editing programs available. You can even download a few free ones from the net even though they might have a few limitations. But in any case optimizing your photos and other graphics is definitely worth considering if you want to consider as many users to your website as possible.

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