A New Way to Speed-up Your Web Site

By: Alexander Kasholkin

Multimedia-rich Web sites with many attractive graphics are cute, but often result in slow-loading Web pages. Sluggish performance definitely hurts the user experience and may even affect the position of a site in search engines. What are your options to improve the performance of a graphic-heavy site without making it look less attractive?
First, you could consider adjusting the compression settings when saving your graphics. Smaller, more compact images will load faster, but you will risk using too much compression and reducing the cleanliness of the Web site.
You could also consider using a different lossy compression algorithm such as JPEG to store images. However, JPEG is not suited to be used on images with many small details such as screen shots or texts. You can easily lose more in quality than gain in the reduction of the size if you go this route.
Finally, you could speed up your Web site by cutting large images into series of smaller pieces. Loaded concurrently, smaller graphics have the benefits of faster downloads without any loss of quality. Besides, you can use compression algorithms such as GIF to store large, full-color images without having any pixilation or rough color transition issues.
So how do you know when to take the first, second or third approach to obtain the best loading speed and the highest image quality? Trying various settings by hand is not the best idea in today's world.
Image Splitter (http://www.imagecure.com) is designed to remove the hassle of selecting the best optimization to make Web pages load faster without making sacrifices in image quality.

With Image Splitter, you can easily avoid the compression artifacts introduced by lossy algorithms such as JPEG and GIF, increase the apparent visual quality of large images while reducing the total size of a Web page and speeding up its loading time at the same time. To achieve all this without Image Splitter, one would need hours of trial and error in choosing the appropriate compression methods and settings for each slice of an image. Image Splitter makes that happen completely automatically.
Image Splitter makes it easy to design graphic-heavy Web sites by automating the creation of image-based navigation and menus. The product automatically cuts images representing various navigation elements or menu items into separate pieces, and makes online hot-tracking work as fast as when off-line. Image Splitter automatically generates HTML tables with colspan and rowspan tags. Supporting a variety of Web image formats such as JPEG, GIF, and PNG, and recognizing targeted events such as ALT, TARGET, OnMouseOver, and OnMouseOut, Image Splitter is the perfect tool for any serious Web designer. If you have a large Web site with lots of graphics, Image Splitter features fully-automatic batch mode to split a bunch of images at the same time.

Make your sites faster and your job as a Web designer easier! Visit http://www.imagecure.com for more information and to download a free evaluation version of Image Splitter.