Optimizing images for the web

Having a Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Joomla! to update your website is a huge step forward for managing your website and use it as an effective marketing tool.

However, when it comes to uploading images and files to the site, it is very important to optimize the images to make sure that they load fast in the web browser that your customer is using. This is probably the number one mistake that is made by people that do not fully understand the concept of web image optimization. Without getting too technical, I will try to explain this concept.

Can you see any difference between these two images, when viewing them on the screen?

I can't! The picture on the right is smaller in size but looks actually better.

The reason for this is that a computer screen can only display images at 72 dpi (actually called ppi; Points Per Inch). Pictures that we take with our digital camera are generally much larger than what we need to display the image on the screen and the filesize can be enormous. This is a problem if you want your website to load fast, especially for people with a lower speed Internet connection.

There are many tools available that can take care of this for you. Programs like Photoshop, Fireworks, etc  do a wonderful job but are more geared toward the graphic professionals.

The following website is a FREE online tool that I have found very useful for quickly optimizing images:

http://webresizer.com/

Google Picasa is another free tool, but needs to be downloaded

http://picasa.google.com/

Finally, there are many other free (mostly web-based) tools available to use. This article has a good overview of some of the more common ones:

http://www.lifeclever.com/10-free-web-based-alternatives-to-photoshop/