Performance
Long download times are unnecessary and unprofitable. Making a potential customer wait for your website to download is a surefire way to increase your competitors’ bottom line, not yours.
There are many reasons why a page may load slowly, e.g. the size of the pipe to the Internet, the traffic hitting the web-hosting service and/or the server hosting your website, the robustness of the web server, etc.
But at this juncture, you just need to ensure that your website’s design is not a contributing factor when a customer experiences a slow download. So keep your home page less than 200 KB in size.
By doing this, your website will load in less than 20 seconds with a 56K modem.
If you must display graphics on your home page, keep in mind the different graphic formats that are available, each with its own qualities and capabilities, and what is best to use in specific situations. Web-based images consist of two basic types: those captured from nature and stored in digital format, and those created entirely on the computer.
Most web-based images use “indexed color” which is only 8 bits (one byte) of color per pixel. This means that the image can display only 256 colors. Don’t panic — it isn’t quite as bad as it sounds — you can choose your 256 colors from a huge palette of 24-bit colors.
If you pick the right colors, even a color photo can be made to look presentable on your website.
Many programs such as PhotoShop and Paint Shop Pro will let you reduce the number of colors (color depth) in an image, while selecting the colors closest to the original.
GIF and JPEG (also known as “JPG”) are the most commonly supported formats throughout the world. “GIF” stands for “Graphics Interchange (or Image) Format.” CompuServe developed the GIF format so that its subscribers could send image files to each other and the images could be viewed on different kinds of computers.
A GIF is good for images that have solid colors, text, and line art. A GIF can be used to represent images generated by drawing programs used by computer artists.
However, a GIF does not compress photos very well; especially images that have subtle texture or color gradations, or that are 16- or 24-bit color.
Long download times are unnecessary and unprofitable. Making a potential customer wait for your website to download is a surefire way to increase your competitors’ bottom line, not yours.
There are many reasons why a page may load slowly, e.g. the size of the pipe to the Internet, the traffic hitting the web-hosting service and/or the server hosting your website, the robustness of the web server, etc.
But at this juncture, you just need to ensure that your website’s design is not a contributing factor when a customer experiences a slow download. So keep your home page less than 200 KB in size.
By doing this, your website will load in less than 20 seconds with a 56K modem.
If you must display graphics on your home page, keep in mind the different graphic formats that are available, each with its own qualities and capabilities, and what is best to use in specific situations. Web-based images consist of two basic types: those captured from nature and stored in digital format, and those created entirely on the computer.
Most web-based images use “indexed color” which is only 8 bits (one byte) of color per pixel. This means that the image can display only 256 colors. Don’t panic — it isn’t quite as bad as it sounds — you can choose your 256 colors from a huge palette of 24-bit colors.
If you pick the right colors, even a color photo can be made to look presentable on your website.
Many programs such as PhotoShop and Paint Shop Pro will let you reduce the number of colors (color depth) in an image, while selecting the colors closest to the original.
GIF and JPEG (also known as “JPG”) are the most commonly supported formats throughout the world. “GIF” stands for “Graphics Interchange (or Image) Format.” CompuServe developed the GIF format so that its subscribers could send image files to each other and the images could be viewed on different kinds of computers.
A GIF is good for images that have solid colors, text, and line art. A GIF can be used to represent images generated by drawing programs used by computer artists.
However, a GIF does not compress photos very well; especially images that have subtle texture or color gradations, or that are 16- or 24-bit color.