Images on Your Website

Ever notice how some web pages take forever to load? Often, especially if the page was created by someone without much/any web development experience, it's because the images haven't been optimized for the web. I always laugh when I see an in-house designed site, with corporate bios, the small headshots are around 1MB each! That's ridiculous for on-screen presentation. Those images should be around 10-20KB each. It's so easy to optimize for the web in Photoshop. Just take your image, choose jpeg or gif format, and basically set the "quality" as low as possible while keeping the image looking as good as it should. That's a pretty simplified explanation, but, really, it's not that difficult.

A quick note on the difference between jpeg and gif format: In general, jpegs are used for photos or images with gradients/shadows. Gifs are meant for line drawings. Keep that rule of thumb in mind and you should get good quality images without the huge file sizes.