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Greenguy and Jim Webmaster Tip - Weekly Tip #70 |
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Tip #70: Improving Page Load Time
There are many ways that the perceived load time of a page can be improved. The best way is to reduce the amount of data needed to display the page, this includes all the graphics used in the page. This not only improves perceived performance but reduces the bandwidth utilized on each and every visit to the page.
Over the last year or so, web designers have moved away from displaying text as a small graphics file (GIF format) and instead use plain HTML text with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to control the look of the text. This has a dramatic effect on download performance as the style specification and text are just a few bytes while a graphics file will typically be at least a thousand bytes.
Graphics file size can be greatly reduced also (quite probably by a factor of up to four times) by reducing the number of colors used to the bare minimum. This has two benefits, using 16 instead of 256 or more colors per pixel will scale down the file size and it will also help ensure that there are long runs of pixels of the same color so that a GIF file can be compressed down more. This may take a little experimentation - balancing the desire for a smaller size but maintaining an adequate picture resolution.
Thank You For Your Support
Greenguy & Jim
Check out GreenguyandJim.com for even more webmaster tips, tricks, resources & support - and don't forget to come back to Klixxx.com every Tuesday for another exclusive webmaster tip from GreenguyandJim.com!
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