The speed your web pages load is directly proportional to the number of customers your web site will generate. We've all been there - click on a link, 10 seconds pass, still nothing, click "back", out of there. That's all it takes and you've lost a visitor, one that could have been converted into a customer.

The stats say it all... you have 10 - 20 seconds to hook the visitor and make them want to stay. How can you as a webmaster make your site load faster?

1. Always, and I mean always, include width and height tags in your images. Most HTML editors do this for you but check the HTML source code to make sure they are in there.

eg.<IMG SRC="contents.gif" WIDTH=25 HEIGHT=10 ALT="Contents">

This lets your text load and display before the images in your page have finished loading. This is because the web browser knows how the page will look without having to load the images to see where the text fits in.

** Hot Tip: The "ALT" tag shows the text that will be displayed if your images don't load (eg if your visitor has images turned off) and is also one thing search engines look for when visiting your site.**

Choose an appropriate format
Generally speaking file size will normally drop as image quality drops. So in other words the better quality image you want, the bigger the file size will be.

One of the best ways to reduce file-size while retaining quality, is to choose the correct image format (PNG, JPEG or GIF).

PNG Images
Simply put, as a marketer who wants everyone to be able to view my pages first time, I will never use PNG images. They are not supported across all browsers, so avoid them until they are universally supported by at least 99.9% of the web population.

JPEG Images
JPEG is usually better that GIF if your images have complex patterns, are photographs, use thousands of colors or are very complex.

If you use JPEG images, you have one major way to vary the size of your images - the quality (usually expressed as a percentage). Basically the higher the quality, the bigger the file size of your image and the better the quality. You need to experiment to find the best settings for your images. Good programs help you do this very easily.

JPEG's have an option called progressive encoding. Progressive encoding forces the browser to load the JPEG in many passes, each pass improving slightly until the image is fully loaded.

GIF Images
GIF is usually better if your images are simple or contain fewer colors. GIF images can only contain a maximum of 256 colors and you should make sure that when you create GIF's you save them with a web-safe palette. Don't worry because almost all programs that deal with GIF images can apply a web-safe palette to your files with a single click.

A palette is simply the set of colors that make up your image. All images on your web pages should have the same palette. This is important to remember because not everyone has a screen which displays thousands or millions of colors. It's no use designing high color images if not everybody can view them.

The use of "dithering" can further reduce the size of your images. Dithering allows your images to be made up of fewer colors by grouping similar colors close together to form an illusion. eg. black and white are packed closely together to form gray.

So How Do I Do All This?
Well thank goodness this is not a manual process! There are many programs available that will make the above process simple.

Some great free programs exist to help you out:

Gif Wizard - A free web service, plug in your websites URL and they will scan it for you. They'll produce different versions of your images so that you can select which to use. Just upload the results.
     http://www.gifwizard.com

Web Site Garage - A great free service that has resources for tuning your webpages so that they load fast!
     http://www.websitegarage.com

Some of the better commercial programs available are:

Paint Shop Pro 6 - This is my all time favorite tool for both creating my web sites graphics and optimizing them. The new GIF and JPEG export wizards let you play with settings in real time and see the results in both quality and size at the same time. A trial version is available for download at their website.
     http://www.jasc.com

Image Optimizer - Great easy to use program, and excellent value for money.
     http://www.xat.com

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