Monday, 7 October 2013

Updating The Speed Of Your Website

By Franklin Skribbit


One of the greatest marketing points of your website is how fast it loads. Everywhere you look, internet providers are bragging about the speed of their connections.

It's one of the only draws to internet access. For over a decade, consumers have been looking for something faster and more powerful than before.

It really shouldn't be that difficult right? As any graphic arts professional will tell you though, that's not always the case. Preparing images and documents for publishing in either world requires special consideration and a lot of testing. Here are 2 reasons why.

It's sad to watch that potential fade, especially since they likely have the ability within them that could have made them not only able to do the work, but become very successful at it. They key is not focusing on the elements that keep you from the profession, but instead noticing the ones that make you perfect for it.

Printers use CMYK. Here's why. Computers display color through light. The most complicated combinations of colors in light create the color white.

First, compress your images. The smaller the file size, the less that has to load on your page. If you're using a JPEG, switch to a GIF or PNG. Both of these file types are compressed for web use. They can sometimes drop a three digit sized file down to two. Another tip is to take your pictures and resize them to the size you mean them to appear on the page.

A 300 x 500 sized slot for a picture doesn't need a 1,400 x 2,300 sized picture. On the bare-boned edge, it needs to be only 300 x 500.

Second, clean up your coding. Remove extraneous spaces, unnecessary tags, white space, and other "extra" coding that will take some time for the browser to read.

Any graphic image has to created from an internal setting called RGB (which can be found in most design platforms). Printers, on the other hand, are combining colors of ink to paste on a page. Have you ever mixed too many paint colors together before? The results: a deep, muddy brown or black.

You ask them to draw a bird, and they'll have realistic sketches of a pelican, penguin, and pigeon on your desk within twenty minutes. These people have the gift of artistry and they create beautiful things.

Design programs also let you choose CMYK options when designing a document for print. At the root though, you can see that formula is different for both RGB and CMYK, and that's what makes preparing documents for both mediums so hard for graphic design professionals.

Outside of that, it never hurts to increase your website design education to learn the more formal approaches to CSS coding. You can learn a lot from a professor "in the know."

Fourth, limit your use of flash. Flash additions take up a lot of space. Although they add a beautiful element to your website, the file sizes are too bulky to be useful. They slow down loading time. Not to mention, they hurt you from an SEO standpoint. Google cannot read text in a Flash element. It therefore can't rank you high or low. You lose an opportunity to grow.

Fifth and finally, reduce the number of things you load from an outside server. The more reliant the page is on another server for information, the slower the website and the more likely it is to fail. It's like trying to get a timely news article to the press, but having to get the CEO of Apple, Bill Gates, and the President of the United States on the phone for approval. The requests can take a long time.

The process can still be hard at times, especially when you fall in love with a color that simply won't print right. Graphic arts professionals figure it out with time though.




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