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

Budding Biologist has a new website

A cute website for a really neat childrens’ book series by budding biologist. Their new website is responsive, meaning it is mobile ready and will display correctly across all devices and all browsers. Integrated web store and using the latest in HTML 5 and CSS3 media queries. Cloud

Woocommerce Products Per Page

Interestingly Woocommerce does not seem to have a default setting for ‘products per page’. Unsurprisingly, there’s a simple workaround. Add to your functions.php Replace “28” with whatever number you want. add_filter( ‘loop_shop_per_page’, create_function( ‘$cols’, ‘return 28;’ ), 20 );

Sitemaps

Back in the day a simple website could get away with an on-page sitemap. Just a simple list of pages somewhere on the site. Not so much anymore. Sitemaps – at least the ones we intend for search engines to look at – are all internal. We use

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

Maintaining The Correct Keyword Density

Keyword density, by definition, is the number of times, expressed in a percentage, that a particular keyphrase or keyword appears in a body of text. So if your keyword appears 4 times and the number of words on the page is 200 then your keyword density is 2%.

Better Than Notepad: Notepad ++

We love this little program. It’s a replacement for Notepad called Notepad++. It’s like notepad on steroids. Lots of  new, useful functions – essentially, everything Microsoft neglected to put into their product,; open source, once again, has provided a better alternative. Easy find/replace functions, even in files so