The Silent Avatar Speaks

It’s easy to forget about those who are on dial up, but the truth is that even though more Internet users switch to broadband every year, a sizeable portion of the web’s population is still running on a good ol’ dialup connection, so don’t count them out of the equation when you’re designing your website, and one of the major considerations you will need to work with is the loading time of your website.

Generally, all the text on your website will be loaded in a very short time even on a dialup connection; however the culprit of slow-loading sites is mainly due to large images on the website. It’s very important to strike a delicate balance between using enough images to attract your users, but not so many they bog down the overall loading time of your site.

It’s also a good idea to go a bit further and optimize every image on your site to make sure it loads in the least time possible. That means you need to use image editing software to remove unnecessary information on your images, and thereby effectively reducing the file size of your image without affecting its overall appearance.

If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the “quality” of the JPEG image — normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there are many free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image’s file size.

On the other hand, you can opt to save your images in PNG format to get the best quality at the least file size. You can also save your images in GIF format — the image editing software clips away all the color information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so make your choice wisely!

Tags: Web Design by the silent avatar
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Is your website a freind or a fiend to the search engines?

There’s absolutely no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in, and a major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista and so on. By designing a search engine friendly site, you’ll be able to bolster your website rank in search engines and obtain more visitors

• Search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, read the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.

• If you want to make your site get indexed easily, avoid using frames on your website. Frames only confuse search engine robots and you could run the risk the ‘bot’ might abandon your site because of using frames. Also, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts.

• Don’t present important information in Flash movies or in images as search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.

• Use Meta tags on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using Meta tags, you are making the search engine robot’s job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.

• Stop using wrong HTML tags like <font> to style your page. Use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) instead because they are more effective and efficient. By using CSS, you can eliminate redundant HTML tags and make your pages much lighter and faster to load.

Tags: SEO, Web Design by the silent avatar
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