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Image optimization

06 June 2012

Designing a website of good quality requires certain technical skills and expertise. And yet, many web designers unintentionally keep on doing some mistakes. They keep on littering up web pages with numerous images, video files and interactive applications which make a website look chaotic, poorly optimized and piled up. Web developers tend to underestimate the necessity of optimizing graphic files and thus, their websites need much more time to load.

Why should image optimization be done?

Oftentimes people browse the Internet, looking for certain images. Someone may be interested in pictures to accompany their blogs, someone wants to find a picture of a product just to see how it looks like. In both cases, if you’ve got a nice website with the relevant content, there’s always a chance to win more customers and followers in this way. The fact is, today most of the searches include the image searches too.

The way to optimize images

So now you’ve decided to optmize the pictures for the search engines and wonder how to do it. The first important thing is to organize your pictures and remove those images which don’t give any value to the website. The next thing is to keep the dimensions and the format of pictures readable for the bot. The names of the images should conform to the essence because search engine crawlers cannot read the graphic files. What they do read are the tags you use for your images. Keeping pictures in a directory can help you to make them accessible to the web crawlers. Besides, you can optimize your images by letting other websites use your images and link back the images to their original location.

A nice looking web design: a discussion of the latest trends

10 May 2012

A successful and efficient web design requires keeping up with the new trends and technologies. Today the Internet gives all the opportunities to the web designers to get more creative and more experimental. The designers can modify and combine existing trends to achieve better outcome and impress pretentious visitors. In this blog I’d like to review the most commonly known techniques to attract visitors’ attention and stick them to the website.

One Page

When creating a single page as a web site, you can clearly see what features are unnecessary and what’s worth of meticulous work. Websites of this type are good as business cards to make brief introduction of the companies. Such website can be like a personal profile to allocate the most important information you’d like to convey to the users.

Images

Large headers and logos grab visitors’ attention and set their eyes on the important note on the site. However, oversized images can have the same effect and positively impress occasional visitors. The usage of large graphic files is a good trick to drive new customers from various web resources to your website. Therefore, it would be fair to say that large images are a kind of invitation for the customers.

Perspective

With the emergence of new equipment and tools, the life of modern society comprehensively changes day after day. Nowadays the computer screens can display more realistic view, therefore professional web designers experiment with perspective to create an outstanding and realistic web design.

Interactive components

Interactive applications are not the outdated past. They are still widely used by the designers to create a special magnetizing effect and draw the visitors’ attention to the essential note on a site. However, today they are designed in a more professional way and are not that annoying as they were in the past.

Large footers

The footer can display useful links and a lot of random information from different social media to help the visitors to navigate through the website.

Photo Optimization is important

08 May 2012

Whilst creating a website it’s critical to optimize the web pages so that they can upload as quickly as it’s possible. Big files require longer time, therefore they significantly slow down the website. To optimize the graphic files is a must thing if you want to improve quality of the website and attract more customers. If a website takes too long to load, the visitors will quickly click away to another site.

The resolution of the computer screens is only 72 dots per inch. For this reason you should reduce resolution of the pictures. If they are too large, you can slice them into smaller pieces and put them back together on the web page. Another effective method to optimize the graphic files on the website is to use JPG or PNG. Using these formats, the pictures can load quickly but firstly as the blurred images. Within seconds they become sharper and clearer.

Many web designers use dozens of pictures to better display the products or services on the website, however it turns out to be not that good idea despite a beautiful website look. Usage of a fewer images on the website can greatly speed up the downloading time.

Quality of the pictures depends on such factors as color purity, details specification, clarity and color saturation. You can improve picture quality using basic graphic editors. Most of them can help you to reduce noise of the picture, sharpen it, remove the red-eye, change the background, correct the edges etc.

Here I’d like to share some ideas on how to optimize the pictures for the fast download times. Following these basic rules you won’t need to sacrifice quality of the pictures. Firstly, resolution is recommended to be changed to 72 dots per inch. The next thing to do is to convert the graphic texts into proper texts on the website. Doing so, you will greatly speed up the downloading time and at the same time improve search engine optimization. Minimizing the images to the needed size can also be very helpful.

Bear in mind, that your visitors are interested not only in a beautiful website look, but also its functionality. If the website works gradually, people with the slow Internet may not want to come back to your website again, even if it’s been designed properly.

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