For the Love of God, Optimize those Images!

Time for another lesson in web design: Image Optimization! Yes, as we all know it is really pretty to have a huge header on your website. Hey, look at this website, I have large images on my front page. But, you don’t have to make that experience painful for your users, especially those on *gasp* dial-up!

The solution is simple: optimize your images. I use Fireworks, but Photoshop has it built in these days as well. It is basically a way of taking the image you want to use, and removes unwanted data, making the image size smaller, and hence, faster to load. The web is a horrible medium for images, the 72dpi resolution of most monitors is just not that great. But, it is all we have right now, and that is probably a good thing since anything more and the image just gets bigger and bigger.

By optimizing, your look stays intact, and everyone can enjoy it faster. And it is cheaper on your wallet since it requires less bandwidth and less CPU to serve a smaller file. Speaking of cheap, for those of you that do not have the Adobe suite, there is a pretty spiffy free online optimizer here. Enjoy, and for the love of all things holy, optimize!

If you want to read more on the topic: HTMLSource.