Graphics
Misused graphics can kill a business
website stone dead.
What is the point in working hard
to get customers to your website only for them to leave again
because they had to wait too long for your pages to load?
If your business website pages are
slow to load there is little doubt that you will be losing
customers.
The main cause in many cases are over
used and oversized graphics.
Many people make the mistake of
using large graphics and some sites even make their homepages
of nothing but graphics. These pages often take so long to load
that people just loose patience and leave.
It cannot be overemphasised that
the first page of a business website (all pages in fact) should
be quick to load. You have to tell people straight away what
benefits your business can give to them.
So forget about a homepage with
a large graphic and the words "welcome" or "click
here to enter" under it. They don't work well at all.
Your site should use graphics sensibly
and keep them to a minimum. That might sound strange with a
visual media such as the Internet but in most cases words work better.
There is another good reason
too - Search Engines rank sites by keywords not pictures
and they do that mainly from the first page they find. They also
penalise slow loading pages and some will refuse to list slow
sites. Search Engines are primarily considering there users
not you and they want to serve up sites that provide what
their customers (searchers) are looking for - quickly.
Of course, graphics cannot be avoided
completely and there is no need too provided you know what you
are doing. Obviously Property Companies and the like must have
many graphics on their websites because people want to see the
houses they have for sale. Likewise Hotels want to show their rooms,
etc. to customers.
The key point with graphics
is to make sure they are not oversized in the first place
and then to make the file size smaller by a process known
as graphics compression.
This process, when done properly does
not diminish image quality and can reduce the file size by up to
80%. That makes the images load much more quickly.
Here are two examples of before
and after image compression. These
two images open in pop-up windows when you click on the links. The
first one will be slow to load, you will see the difference in
loading speed when you open the second one.
Image one (73,000
bytes) - before compression - Click
Here
Image two (27,000
bytes) - after compression - over 60% reduction - Click
Here
As part of the process of recovering
a website we ensure all graphics are properly optimised for
speed of loading. In some cases we may recommend alternatives to
using graphics.
Click
here to continue............
