Why do you need to optimize images/animations
for the web - and how

If you have a web site, you know how images and animations hugely improve its appeal. Without nice graphics, your pages would look dull and boring. However, you should keep in mind that web is such a medium where optimizing your images and animations is an absolute must:

Speed is crucial for the success of your site: if your pages are slow to load, your visitors will leave
Too many images will distract your visitors, and
Images / animations you keep on your pages need to look their best.

You need to make sure your web pages load fast, or all your effort in bringing visitors to your site will be lost - they will leave without giving you a chance. You cannot assume that all of your visitors have fast connection - they don't - and saving few seconds and showing your site faster can make an enormous difference between people leaving in irritation or staying to see what you are offering.

What should you do? There are 3 things you can do quickly that will make a huge difference:

1. Get rid of all the unnecessary images/animations
2. Perfect the images/animations you decide to keep, and
3. Optimize for size to keep the loading of your pages fast.

To make 2. and 3. easy for you to do, Antechinus® Animator Professional includes tools you won't find anywhere else.

1. Get rid of all the unnecessary images/animations

Ask yourself if the images and animations contribute to the message you are trying to convey. If they don't, just delete them. Having done that, keep in mind that you do not want to have an altogether graphics-free site. Well-placed images and animations will:

Illustrate your products and services
Make navigating your site easier, and
Make your site more professional.

2. Perfect the images/animations you decide to keep

You need to give your graphics that extra edge to make people notice them. Animator Professional includes a huge array of image/animation special effects and filters to help you do that, and describing them in detail would take a book.
I will only mention 3 things that work very well on the web:

Add drop shadow to your titles. This takes no time at all and gives the text classy look.
Use the Animator's frame factory to add great-looking borders and frames to your photographic images in seconds.

Built-in preview for all effects makes it easy for you to see what will happen as you apply different options. You will only need a click or two when you use carefully designed presets.

Your navigation will look better if you use 3-state button images for your web pages (normal, roll-over, and pressed). Animator lets you create all 3 images with one click, and you can even save the 3-state definition, allowing you to easily create new buttons.

3. Optimize for size

Images on the web usually come in 3 formats, jpg/jpeg, png, and gif, and they all use compression. However, you can further compress your already compressed images, saving further 30-60% without noticeable loss of quality.

You will find that the ability to preview compressed images a great aid: keep increasing the compression for as long as the image looks good.
Use the built-in download time calculator to see how long will it take to load the image.

Trim the images. There is no point in having the images larger than they have to be. Trim all the white-space around the image, reducing its size and the loading time.

In most cases, one click will be all you need to trim the image. However, if the area being trimmed contains similar-color pixels, preview will let you set the threshold without losing part of the image you need.

Downsize your images. A smaller image can be just as effective. Set the resize method to Bicubic, which will give you better-looking image than using resampling or normal resizing.

Try converting your photographic images to 256-color images. You will be surprised how often you cannot tell the original and the 256-color version apart - not all photo images use millions of colors. When you save the image as gif, Animator Professional will automatically optimize the palette.

Use image maps for navigation. This will allow you to use one single image and map various areas on it for navigation. This is far more efficient than using several individual images.

You create image maps for navigation simply by:

Marking areas of all shapes and sizes on your image, and
Supplying the link for each area.

Optimize animations and videos. With Animator you make sure your animation/video files are highly compressed. For example, uncompressed AVI files are huge, but you can select codecs that give you excellent compression ratio while preserving quality. Animated gif files created by the Animator are automatically optimized.

Putting it all together

Your visitors are always only one click away from going elsewhere. Quality and speed are critical to the success of your web site. Optimizing your graphics will have a huge impact on the number of visitors who decide to stay. Optimizing the graphics can be time-consuming, costly and tedious. But, with the right tool it is fast, easy, and FUN.

Enhance and optimize your graphics - it can literally make or break your business.

Click here to find out more about Animator Professional.