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Make It Snappy!

Author: David Dunkerly Author's URL: www.spoono.com More by this author

Make It Snappy! Surfers get irritated with slow sites, so learn how to optimize your images to make your site lightning fast.

A common mistake in web site creation is to become soooooooooo excited about the "creation", and add so much great detail and care to your graphics that you forget that someone actually has to "download and view" this stuff!

On some sites lots of great high-resolution graphics are an absolute necessity... after all it is a site predominately about graphics. To combat this obvious difficulty, it is always important to make use of "Image Optimization Software". What these programs do, is remove all of the excess colors and "hidden info" in an image that cause it to be a lot more bulky than it really has to be.

So, you can see how this could get quite useful on a graphic-intensive site. As a matter of fact, EVERY SITE should use Optimiztion.

My site doesn't have that many graphics on it... why should I bother with optimization?

Every image can benefit from a quick tune-up with an Image Optimizer. Every second can count when a sale is on the line.

Where/How can I get my images optimized?

There are an abundent slew of sites and programs available which can provide you with optimization for your images. I have listed a few of them for you below:

SITES:

PROGRAMS:

My site is still slow... What's The Deal?

Another way to speed up the load-time for your web site is to make sure that you always define a WIDTH and HEIGHT for every image on your page. Also, make sure you define a WIDTH in either pixels (i.e. WIDTH= "236") or percentage (i.e. WIDTH="55%") for every TABLE on your site. This will help the browser to more quickly interpret the contents of the page, thus allowing it to load slightly faster!

Still Slow

If your site is still too slow and you believe that it should be faster, you may need to find a web host with a faster connection to the Internet backbone. For help in locating a better host, see Tophosts.com