Eight seconds – that’s how long a visitor on a website can change his mind and click to another site if he is not contented by your navigation. The cause of this may be your gigantic and pompous graphics and photos. To keep visitors from turning their backs away from your site, here are some viable remedies. Resize the size of your graphics and photos, reduce its colors and save them in a compressed file format.

In resizing your image or graphic, you can use image-editing program to exact the size that you want to use for your website. To do this, do not forget to include the height and width attributes of the image because these attributes will tell the browser what size the image should be thus, a quicker page load will occur.

To reduce the size of your image, it is indispensable to eliminate unnecessary colors. A graphics saved with three colors is going to occupy a lot of space compared to a graphics with 200 colors. Thus, more color means bigger size.

Color banding will result when colors are already reduced. This means that the areas where colors are eliminated will be filled with solid bands of color. Dithering can be utilized to help reduce color banding. Though, expect that your file size will increase slightly nonetheless, it will help achieve quality colors as well as graphics. This is a bit tricky to the eyes since it creates an illusion of more colors in your image.

The last step is to save your image in the compresses file format. You can utilize GIF or JPEG.

GIF is short for Graphic Interchange Format is a loss-less compression. Here, when image file are compressed, data are not lost. Nevertheless, available colors for this technique are approximately 256. This is most commonly used in sketches, drawings, small icons and less colorful graphics. When using GIF, you must determine the quality of the image you can risk in order to transform it in a smaller size. In this technique you can set a transparent background especially in cases where you wan to place an image on a gradient or patterned background. Another technique is the JPEG short of Joint Photographic Experts Group. It is saved in a 24-bit format and can be used for millions of colors. This technique is a loose compression. To avoid losing some data, save the original image in a lossless format so that you can easily grab it for editing purposes. You can use the Cache feature on the hard drive so that it can be readily available when you need it.

Now you have a more accessible site! Expect a greater number of visitors..