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Choice Hosting FAQ - Web Hosting Frequently Asked Questions Can I reduce the amount of bandwidth my website uses?Yes you can. By optimizing all the graphics like banners, logo's, photos and other images on your site. When you insert your images into your website, the dimesions of that image reflect as small, but find out what the file size and dimensions are for that image. If your website page takes longer than 10 Seconds to loads (on broadband connection), then your visitors will not wait around too long and would will look around for another website that will give them the information they desire faster. Fortunately, there is a solution: you can optimize your graphics for your website. Your graphics should be in either .gif or .jpg formats (.gif works best for logos and navigation buttons, while .jpg works best for photographs.) The idea is to reduce the filesize of your images so that they take less data bytes as possible while retaining acceptable quality. This can be done using free on-line image optimization tools. One of the best ones out there is Gifbot, by Netmechanic. They have a easy to use web-based interface that works like this: you upload your image, they process it, and almost instantaneously they will give you several lighter versions of your image for you to choose. Pick the image that takes the fewest bytes while still retaining and acceptable quality level. It is not uncommon to reduce the weight of a picture by up to 70% with no noticeable decrease in quality (especially if the image is in .jpg format.) Another useful tip is to use thumbnails. Thumbnails are smaller versions of a picture or image that are hyperlinked to its actual size version. The thumbnail will load fast, and by clicking on it your visitors will be able to see the actual size version. A great free tool for this that is very easy to use and can create thumbnails of 100's of photos at once is Easy Thumbnails. Use all these techniques and you will have a website that loads a lot faster for your visitors and keeping them happy, as well as saving more of your hosting space and bandwidth on your web hosting account.
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