Re: Web builders Help Please
Posted: Mon Sep 13, 2004 7:13 pm
Email me (the addy is in my profile) for info, i have my own web-design site, & tons of knowledge/experience in these matters.
I guess the reason they took ages to load was down to a fairly common mistake made by many "webmasters".... a large picture is "squeezed" into a small space. It may look thumbnail size but it's still (tens/hundreds of) thousands of bits in size because the 840 x 620 photo has been allocated a space of 84 x 62 on the web page. The photo hasn't been made 10 times smaller, it's just been forced to look 10 times smaller.
Firstly find the compression tool in whatever picture editor you use (Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, etc). Compressing an image removes some of the unused data... you can compress some images quite a bit without too much loss of image quality. (Tip: When compressing, rename the photo so that you still retain the original in all its glory!) This will drastically reduce the size (in bits, not pixel x pixel) of the photo, and therefore the download time for those using a dial-up connection.
Once you have done this to all the photos you wish to publish to the web, use the "batch" tool to resize them so that they are all the same width and height.
Create thumbnails of these images (either in Photoshop, etc or by using one of the many free image publishing tools available on the net) and that's pretty much it! Some web publishing programs will automatically link the thumbnails they have created to the larger originals, and format the page to look like a gallery. Otherwise it's a simple case of using whatever tools are available to you in your prefered web editor.
Hope this helps.
