Acid-Lounge.com

Even though more and more Internet users switch to broadband every year, a large portion of the web's population is still running on good old dialup connections. It is therefore unwise to count them out of the equation when you're designing your website, and a very major consideration we have to make for dialup users is the loading time of your website.

Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection. The culprit of slow-loading sites is mainly large images on your website, and it is very important to strike a delicate balance between using just enough images to attract your users and not to bog down the overall loading time of your site.

You should also go to a greater length and optimize every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. What I really mean is to use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its appearance.

If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the "quality" of the JPEG image -- normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there are many free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image's file size.

On the other hand, you can opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality at the least file size. You can also save your images in GIF format -- the image editing software clips away all the color information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely! You should also be aware, that there is no hard and fast format that is "always the smallest" software such as photoshop will show you the size the image will end up in any given format!

The best I've found is Paint.NET .. does anything you'll ever need in a Photoshop-like proggy and FREE!

I have photoshop, and have been recommend GIMP which is also free!

Keep an eye on what OS's & browsers your visitors are using. There are a number of people still using Win9x, NT4, and IE versions less than the 7.

They will all have problems with PNG's containing alpha channels (transparency). Instead of seeing a transparent background, they will see the color that is set for buttons, which matches whatever they are using for their taskbar. This can look quite ugly, and surely isn't what you had in mind when designing your site.

If you need to use transparency, go with GIF till the rest of the world catches up and all browsers support PNG's properly, and everyone is using them.

Also, animated GIF's: If you have visitors using certain mobile devices, they can't see the animations. They only see the first frame of it.

So make sure you check your logs and design for your visitors and not yourself. After all, you don't make money off yourself, you make money off your visitors.

If you aren't getting the info you need about OS, browsers & versions, screen resolution, etc, consider using Google Analytics. You'll get all that info and a lot more.

ProJPEG has been the ultimate JPEG tool for Web graphics professionals for over five years, providing ease, power, control, superior image quality, and the most file size savings to improve the effectiveness of Web sites and ease of authoring. ProJPEG is a file-format plug-in for Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro providing true seamless integration with open and save simplicity, eliminating the need to use multiple applications for Web JPEGs.

Version 5.x adds the most significant advancements to ProJPEG ever, with improved memory handling to allow ProJPEG to work for Web graphics or hi-res JPEG images and advanced Photoshop actions support for batch processing and automated work flow, plus a new interface with resizable and zoomable image previews for better compression feedback and ergonomic work flow. Paint Shop Pro is also supported by ProJPEG now on Windows, in addition to Photoshop.


Thats the blurp for the best plugin I have seen for photoshop and jpeg compression. I find that most images don't gain a great deal from exceeding 70% quality on the web however for print media that can be increased with awesome compression and great quality.

He's negated to mention he owns 51% of the share stock