The single reason why you would want to optimize your website graphics is to make your website load faster for your visitors. To attain faster download speeds, it is necessary for you to decrease the size of your web graphics. A slow loading website will definitely keep your visitors away.

You should either reduce the image to look smaller, lessen the number of colours or you can compress the image although you may lose some of its quality.

If you aim to display your website graphics, it is best not to decrease the number of colours of the images as then there would not be much left to show. What you can do is to create a thumbnail image with trimmed colours and link it to another page which contains the original intended size of the image in full colours. You can also indicate the file size information so your visitors will have the choice to view it if they want.

For optimal colour reduction, you should use website graphics in JPG format for photos and GIF format for logos and text. While GIF images are usually set to a 256 colour palette, they can be easily decreased. However, there are a few of these GIF web graphics which cannot be reduced to 16 colours. You will see a remarkable difference in file sizes after the changes.

Another wonderful way to customize your website is to use background images. This will generate a coherent look to your visitors. As the web graphic will remain in the cache, your visitor only has to download it once and it’s the same across all your other web pages. To achieve a faster download speed, ensure as much as possible to keep the colours of your background images to a minimum. Should you decide on a large image for your background, make sure that you set a background colour, so while waiting for the background to be visible, the relevant text can be seen.

If you apply tiles, avoid clashing with the text by fading them out. Larger tiles will make the repetition less noticeable. Small patterned tiles are excellent as backgrounds for tables, especially if the tables have areas that are transparent that will allow the background images to show.

Lastly, it’s highly imperative that you save your web graphics in its original file format after you do any multi-layering. If you do then decide to add text to your image later, you will not be required to re-optimize the image thus damaging and distorting it further.

Remember, your website containing optimized website graphics will certainly not keep your visitors away!

optimize website graphics, Web Graphics, website graphics

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 21st, 2007 at 18:52 and is filed under Web Graphics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.