In the ‘Best designed websites of the week’ series, I list down the top five websites which amaze me with their design concept. I also discuss briefly about an important aspect in web design.

Today, I will discuss about the image optimization as it is important for both web design and page loading time.

As you know, images are one of the most bandwidth consuming elements of the web. At the same time, it is also one of the most important elements in web design. While providing a good quality image is necessary for web design, it can take a lot of time to load in your visitor’s browser. It can also adversely affect your search rankings as page loading time is quite an important factor as far as search engine optimization goes.

However, with simple improvements, you can reduce the size of the images significantly without sacrificing on quality. Here are a few simple and easy techniques; you can adopt to optimize your images:

• Crop out the unnecessary area of the image and the white spaces. If you wish to provide some space around the image, use CSS instead.
• If you are using an image with a lot of color in it like photographs, use JPEG format.
• For the images with limited colors like charts, graphics, icon, etc.; it is a good idea to go for GIF format.
• Use photo optimization software such as PhotoShop to compress the file size and use ‘save the image for the web’ option.
• You can use progressive JPEG format for large images. With a little file size increase, it improves user experience greatly.
• For background and blurred images, go for low quality option while saving it.
• There are several online image optimization tools available for free, use one which you find most suitable and user friendly.
• Because the 8-bit PNG and GIF formats can be saved in a much smaller sizes, try to keep the number of colors to a minimum and use flat graphics instead of photographs.

The Best Designed Websites of the Week are:

FHOKE

VASONA NETWORKS

AWESOME NYC

FANNABEE

VALE

As always, if you want to include your website in the next ‘Best Designed Websites of the Week’ collection, please let me know.

Which website do you like most. Please put your comments below.