Remember Your Images
If you use images, and who doesn’t, do you ever consider their size? I mean, do you plunk them into a web page in Front Page fresh out of the scanner and think it’s OK?
Whoa! It’s definitely NOT OK.
Scanners usually produce humongous images that are Megabytes in size, just because they produce them in a format that creates such a huge file. Or, because it’s a full-size image you’re using when you really only need a thmbnail.
Before putting any images into your pages, consider the size. If it’s more than a couple of hundred KB, you probably need to resize it.
There are plenty of ways to do that, and some folks have Adobe Photoshop, which is a pretty expensive program. Yet, if they spent that much, chances are they already know about changing image sizes. So… let’s talk about a program that works much like Photoshop but is infinitely less expensive… it’s free.
The program is called “Gimp,” and you can do much the same stuff with is as you can with Photoshop, which is really sweet for free. It will open photoshop images, too, so that you can work on them. You can download it at Gimp.org
But even resizing images may not be enough. If you really want to crank up your pages and crank down their sizes, try a Firefox Add-on called Smush.it. You can go to the site, feed it an image and it will “smush” it down for you. I had an image of Tellman smushed from 64K to 2.6K. Imagine how much faster your pages will load with a little smushing.
And think of how much happier your visitors will be when they don’t have to sit there waiting for your 2M image to load up. Oh yeah, and Smush.it is free, too. So, take the image into Gimp and resize it to reasonable dimensions and then Smush.it!
