Skip to main content Screen Reader Website Version

Understanding Image Optimization

Image optimization is complicated and a multi-tiered process that takes months of study and practice.

Just kidding. It’s easy.

First, make sure you’re images aren’t huge. Most digital devices take pictures in high resolutions and most stock photos come that way. Always size your images to the exact size they’re going to be online. If you’re using relative widths with a responsive design (eg 100%, 90%,) then size it to the max width you’re using and consider using media queries to  scale down the image if possible for mobile devices and tablets.

Second throw your images through an optimizer to reduce their overall “weight”. This won’t affect image quality most often and will reduce the KB of your image by up to 95%. So a 100KB image becomes more like 5KB. This is significant. The best image optimizer (free) on the market it RIOT. http://luci.criosweb.ro/riot/ RIOT is easy to use and does a great job on jpegs … not so much on transparent png’s. Still it is very useful and best of all, free.

Ultimately, that is it. Size your images and run them through an optimizer …. aaaaaand…. you’re done. Simple. Livewire.

More Web Design Blog Content

The Amazon Dams Network

Proud to present the first online version of the Amazon Dams Network. This has been a project Livewire has been working on for several months with the University of Florida and other members from around the world. This has been a very exciting project and we are pleased

Haile’s Angels Pet Rescue has a New Website

Customized WP theme – a great choice for a great organization. Haile’s Angels continues to do some great work in our community focusing on our four legged friends. They take in a good number of pets each month and try to find them forever homes. As a no-kill

What You Should be Asking

When hiring a developer, many people don’t know what questions they should be asking – if they knew, then they’d probably be doing the work themselves, right? First and foremost – ask for examples of previous projects. The surefire way to weed out the novices is to look

WordPress Email Issues

Every now and again we run into issues with WordPress where the email functionality has stopped working. This is usually the result of corrupted core files and/or plugin conflicts. Easy enough to fix: disable plugins or upload a fresh copy of the software and you’re good to go.

JSON and PHP

Here at Livewire, Gainesville Web Design headquarters, we have had a couple of projects recently that allowed us to work with JSON and PHP. Initially it may seem a bit strange for PHP experts to want to embed javascript functionality in their code base but the two work