By: John Vinson

Compress, Compress, Compress: When you’re adding images to your website, you need to keep one thing in mind. The size of your site should be treated like an inventory, or budget. You only have a certain amount of space to use, as you don’t want your site to become too large from a file size point of view. If an individual page is taking 8-10 seconds to load on a broadband connection, then it’s too big.

If you did take an inventory of your site, you’d see that images is what bogs things down for you. To stop this from happening, you need to decrease your image’s file size as much as possible. The best program to do this in is Photoshop. When you export an image, you’re given options that can greatly help decrease an image’s file size. You can save it in a certain format that provides smaller sizes, or decrease the quality.

Flash can be your friend, but on in certain situations: When web designers caught on to everything that Flash was capable of, there was a huge revolution for the program. Animated, and stylized menus that could play embedded movies and the list goes on. The only problem is that while people love style, they love speed more so.  When deciding on whether to use Flash or not,
ask yourself one question…

Is my site content based, or artistically based?

If the function of the site you’re creating is about informing your visitors, or selling your content then leave Flash alone. Or if you do use it, make it minimal. Your wanting people to access your site faster so the content of your site draws them in.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Tips. 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.