One of the main reasons your web page down-loads slowly, is the size of the image files on your page. You will find that most of your images are crammed full with colours you don't need. If you 'optimise' your images and take out the excess colours then you can dramatically reduce the size of you image files.
I have given 2 examples below from my own site so you can really see it works. You'll be hard pushed to spot the difference.
Two Photo jpegs - Before and after
optimisation.
Original file size 17.2kb - after optimisation 9.96kb.
Two buttons gifs. Before
and after optimisation.
Original file size 2.08kb. After
optimisation 859bytes.
Now - if you compound all the savings - from all the optimised images - you can produce a HUGE saving on a whole page and if I take my own "index.html" page as an example:-
Before optimisation - page size (html)=19kb.
Images=44kb. Total Page size= 63kb.
This gave a download time on a 28.8 modem of about 21 secs.
After optimisation - page size (html)=19kb.
Images=20kb. Total Page size= 39kb.
This gave a download time on a 28.8 modem of about 12.5 secs.
Now 7.5 seconds might not sound a lot to you - but its the difference between a page visitor staying or going elsewhere at times!!
Well this really is the easy bit .... lol. If you go to The Netmechanic GIFBot or Virtually Ignorant you can optimize all your images for free. Can you get easier than that ?? Just put in your page url - it brings up all the images on your page - click on the image you want to optimise - then you are given about 10 choices at varying degrees of colour reduction - choose the one you want and download it to your computer - then rename the image file to what you want. Easy !
© Jimsky's Emporium 2004 - 2007.