crop on the images and compress them more

[alkscd]

How could I do a tighter crop on the images and compress them more, so the picture can upload quicker on main web page. www.itemsabout.com

[Naja]

Check out the:

Gif Cruncher

They sell the program, but they also have a free online demo. You can use it as much as you like.

You exchange quality for quantity, but often times you can save a lot of bytes without any noticeable loss in quality.
With the small files sizes and visual size of those thumbs--you can probably save 25-50% w/o noticing much/any quality loss.

Check it out

[mike breck]

I don't think the download times are too bad, actually - 26 secs on my dial-up. However, less than 20 secs is the Holy Grail.

However, if you can crunch them more without affecting the quality, then so much the better.

If you're finding they download quickly sometimes and painfully slow at other times, then that's a problem you should take up with your Web Hosting company - or change to a different company.

If you want to speed things up more, then another question you must ask yourself, is whether you actually need all those jpegs of products on your Home Page - or whether less would suffice.

Do you actually need decorative buttons for navigation or would simple text vertical and/or horizontal side navigation suffice?

A Home Page should always load as quickly as possible and then it is acceptable to take more time when loading the product pages.

However, as I've said, i'm on dial-up. Presuming your Host company has a fast server, then people with cable should be downloading your Website, as it stands, much faster.

Would someone with cable time how long it takes to download.

[mairving]

Well there are other things that you should do. For one, it is always a bad idea to have images or pages on a website that contain spaces. So an file named "picture of bill gates.jpg" would be much better as "picture_of_bill_gates.jpg". Also I would add a border="0" to the image link. This would remove the purple border around the picture. You need to also add a link underneath the picture to say something like "see larger image". People often don't know that there is a link if you don't tell them.

Also I would tighten the shot on the pictures themselves so that you don't have as much unused space around them. I would also put them in a well lighted area with a white background so they will display better. If you did this you could make the images smaller on the page.

[Naja]

If u don't have a good photo program like adobe photoshop or image ready 3.0 then used the gif cruncher. It would be faster to use a program on ur pc, instead of the web. But the GIF Cruncher will do the job.

Also I would tighten the shot on the pictures themselves so that you don't have as much unused space around them. I would also put them in a well lighted area with a white background so they will display better. If you did this you could make the images smaller on the page.

That's very true. If you retake the pics with much better lighting (a shoplight or 2 will do it, or on a bright sunny day--before 10am/after 2 pm) on a solid background (white is preferrable) you will not only capture the products better, but you will eliminate a whole bunch of colors=less bytes (sometimes a LOT less).

Crop them tight and save them at the LOWEST quality without affecting their visual quality.

Do you actually need decorative buttons for navigation

If U really like ur buttons then why not set them up in a table as a background and then just center the text over them? That way the background button only loads once, but it looks likes 6 different buttons. If that button is 2KB x 6=12KB. A table background would save you 10KB right there and about 16KB for the bottom set of links. Plus the browser compatability these days is good for table background ie,

[center>< table border=0 width=100%>
[tr>
[td width=30% valign=top>
[table border=0 cellspacing=6 width=156>
[tr>
[td width=148 height=40 background="./images/but3.jpg" align=center valign=middle>[a href="/index.html" style="text-decoration:none">
[font size2>Home[/font>
[/td>[/tr>


[tr>[td width=148 height=40 background="./images/but3.jpg" align=center valign=middle>[a href="/candles.html" style="text-decoration:none">
[font size=2>Company History[/b>[/font>[/a>
[/td>
[/tr>

These a setup vertically, so ud leave out the < tr > & < /tr >