Optimizing Graphics for Web Use

Even today, a large number of people are using dial-up connections with slow browsing speeds. People do not wait around for websites to load. The importance of this factor cannot be emphasized more when one is talking about a business website. You do not want to lose a customer because your website takes ages to load.

You may argue that it is impossible to have a graphic intensive site to load fast. That is not true. All you need to do is optimize your graphics for web use. What optimizing really mean is that you compress the graphics so that their size is smaller. A compromise has to be made between the quality of the graphic and its size.

You can either use a graphic program to optimize your graphics or you can use one of the FREE web services.

In Photoshop:

Click File
Save for Web Use
You can optimize your graphics by trying different settings.
The results are right in front of you so you can compare the before and after scenarios.

My Imager

Upload or call images from anywhere on the web and edit them freely with the dozens of tools they offer.
Restrictions: Images shouldn’t be over 200K
Images will stay on the server until 12:00 AM Pacific Standard Time so save them to your own computer
You will have to tolerate a few pop-ups

JPEG Wizard

The JPEG Wizard Online Optimizer is a free service and allows you to optimize images online
The JPEG Wizard Application also offers the same compression optimization capabilities as the online version but also offers an easy to use WYSIWYG(what you see is what you get) interface for merging multiple images, creating watermarked images, adding text to your images seamlessly, regionally compressing images, and seeing what the result are immediately in batch or single processing modes.

GIFBot

Enter the URL address of the image you would like to optimize or enter a Web page address and they will list all the images on that page. You can also select an image file on your computer to upload. They claim that at GifBot you get:

SpinWave’s GIFCruncher/JPEGCruncher

If you do one image at a time, it is FREE.
Or you can purchase their program and work offline.

This can make a huge difference to the loading speed of your website!