Images and Pictures on Site and Otimization

You should have a link on every page back to your home page as sites like Google take into account not only external link to your site. Also this link enables users to go back to the Home Page, because this page usually contains the most important links to other pages on the site.

Optimize Your Graphics for a Fast Loading Site
Heavy, large-size images can really slow download time.
Images increase both your storage space and your bandwidth needs. As most web hosts offer limited storage space and data transfer allowances, if you go over these limits you will usually have to pay extra money. It is alright to use graphics, but you should optimize them for the web.

If a web page takes more than 10 seconds to load, many people will become impatient and will often just go to another website.

Make your images as small as possible as long as they can be clearly seen. You can use free online graphics optimization tool, as these tools can highly reduce the size of your images without any change in the quality of the picture.

You should use only .gif and .jpg formats for images. Usually .jpg is best for pictures and .gif is best for other graphics. You want to reduce the size of a graphic to the lowest level bytes possible without losing quality. Usually .gif format is best for graphic such as a logo, navigation buttons and graphs and .jpg for photographs. By converting a graphic image to .gif or a picture to a jpg format can reduce their size to one-tenth the size and there will be no change in image quality.

Text is important for search engines and they often do not like flash or JavaScript. Search Engines like HTML text and can crawl your site faster if your site does not have plenty of images.

It is not a good idea to use too many or too large of pictures on your main page, and it is often a good idea to not use them on any pages. Instead of using big pictures you can use thumbnail (small) pictures that users can click on to enlarge them.

It is a good idea to specify the width and height of images with HTML code. If you have the image size set then the text will be positioned in the same place even after the images arrive and the text will not be repositioned. As text will usually load faster as they can start reading the text right away, if you do not set the size of an image, when the pictures arrive the browser will reposition the text, which will slow the download time.

Don’t use graphics that look like ads, as people are trained to ignore them.

Use an ALT attribute for picture, as people often have images turned off in their browser. In this way they can see what the image is and if they want they can view the image.

Placement of Logo for Company
A good place to put the logo is on the upper left-hand corner of the web pages. You should put your logo on every page and it is often suggested that you make the logo clickable back to the home pages.

Flash, Splash Screens and Moving Banners
If your use a ”splash screen” you should have an option that users can click to skip the introduction page.

It is not usually good to use animated banners as they can take a long time to load, but this is something that you may want to test to see if they are effective. If you want your viewer to actually read your copy it can be quite distracting if thing are moving all over the screen or suddenly popping up.

It does not pay to get too fancy when designing a site, as search engine like plenty of text and cannot see pictures. Also the more pictures, Flash and other fancy moving things you have on your site the longer it will take to download.

Do not use opening pages that have much moving graphic that just look cool but don’t add anything to the contents of your site. With a slow connection this can cause a great amount of misery because you have to watch an entire show before viewing your site. Also these pages can cause problems with the rest of the site being indexed by the search engines.

Flash can take a long time to load, which may cause your viewer to depart your site before they even see what is in it.

Gifbot, by Netmechanic — An Image Optimization Tool
This program is a good on-line user-friendly image optimization tool. (http://www.netmechanic.com/GIFBot/optimize-graphic.htm ).

To use this program you upload your picture to their site, it is then processed and very quickly you will have several versions of the picture. They have a web-based interface. This program can reduce the size of an image by more than 75% without being able to see any change in quality (especially for .jpg).

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