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Smush.it: Image Optimization in the Cloud
ReadWriteWeb, CA - 10 hours ago Smush.it provides a one-stop shop for compressing images and works with JPGs, PNGs, GIFs, and animated GIF files. As Yahoo points out, there are already … |
Kelis 1st single from her sophomore album, “Wanderland”
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If you are a new web designer some of your choices while designing your web page can be fatal for your web site and also for your web business. This is especially true if your web site represents your business. We are intended to save you from those pit falls so here we present some of the most common mistakes to avoid at all costs, as it will not only save your web page it will save you from doing hours of after works.
1. Too Many Graphics
Having too many graphics (particularly large graphics), can cause your site to load entirely too slow. Visitors will get impatient and often times click out of your site never to return.
SOLUTION: When possible save your graphics as GIF files (gif.htm) rather than JPEG (jpg.htm). Also, reduce your graphic in actual size as much as you can without distorting the graphic or picture.
2. Counters
A visitor counter or hits counter should not be seen on your site unless you have tremendous traffic. The reason for this is visitors really don’t want to know which visitor they are, especially if they’re visitor number four. There’s no benefit to your visitor, nor is there any benefit to you. The only way showing a counter is advantageous is if you’ve had millions of visitors and wish to display the popularity of your site or would like to attract advertisers with the large numbers. Otherwise, you can use this space for a benefit-packed headline that leads your visitor to another part of your site.
SOLUTION: Most web hosts offer web statistics that reveal daily visitors, hits, referrers, etc. This feature will let you know how many people are visiting your site without the whole world seeing the information. If you’re just starting out, make sure your web host offers this free service.
3. Banners
Limit your banners to the bare necessities. Why? Because banners are graphics that can slow loading time and are a turn-off for many surfers on the internet. For most, “banner” is just another word for “ad” and they avoid clicking on them.
SOLUTION: If you do have a banner or two, place the banner at the very top or bottom of your page. Or you could place a small banner in your sidebar. Most people will look at the first picture they see and then start reading below the picture, so any writing or links that are above the banner may remain unnoticed. Also, the banners on your site should be related to your product or service. Remember, everything on your site should work together to benefit your target customer.
4. Scattered Web Site
When designing your site, make sure it has a pattern that leads your visitor. Get several people (friends or relatives) to visit your site and watch them as they navigate. Notice the places where they stop (as if they’re finished) and also links that they click on. Organizing your site to lead visitors is very important whether you’re leading them to buy something or just to click and go to another place in your site. Customers are silently begging to be led.
SOLUTION: Take a look at the flow of your site. Design it in a fashion that always continues like this…
Make sure that graphics don’t get in the way of your lead. If the visitor stops in the middle of the home page to click on a graphic or banner before getting to your sales page, they may never return. You’ve got one chance to get the visitor’s attention and keep it. Make the most of it.
5. Generalization
The most effective way of selling on the internet is to personalize your web site to reach your target audience. Many web sites are general and try to reach everybody. The reality is that you can’t be everything to everybody. The business owners who are successful on the web normally have very specific products or services that target a niche market.
SOLUTION: Make your site as personal as possible. As you’re writing, pretend that you are face to face with the customer. Present your web site in such a way that the visitor feels like he just walked into a store in his hometown. Also, stay focused on your target customer (one who would be interested in “your” product.)
These five mistakes should be avoided at all costs if you want to build an effective and successful web business.
Design your site to sell!
1. Graphic Laden.
A web page should load in a reasonable amount of time. If you use too many graphics, or graphics that are not scaled and saved in the most efficient format, your pages will take longer to load. Impatient users may bail out and go to another site. Clean and fast should be the goal. You can usually make a very nice layout using HTML and CSS without the whole page being a sliced up graphic. Of course I’ve built sites for people who insisted on pages based entirely on graphics and in that case I usually try to get the Adobe Photoshop files from the graphic artist and slice them and save the slices myself. This way I can mix and match file formats. For example sections with few colors can be saved as gifs which are usually very small, especially if you tweak the number of colors. Sections that contain more colors or photographs work best as jpg image files. Mixing file types like this can cause some issues that you should be aware of: colors may not match exactly between a gif and a jpg. For example if you have a background color in both or some other object in the images of adjoining cells you may have trouble getting a gif and jpg to look seamless because of slight color shifts.
2. Color Choices.
Just because it looks cool to you doesn’t mean everyone will find it easy to read and appreciate your psychedelic color scheme. Try out your color choices on a mix of people before you get too far into your design.
Don’t turn people away just because they have trouble reading your site. There are colors for backgrounds and text that perform much better than others colors for some types of sites, do your research first!
3. Animated Graphics.
You want your visitors to concentrate on whatever your site is about. If your pages look like the arcade at an amusement park with animated gifs everywhere they may never get to the part of the site that you want them to, such as the “buy” button. A little animation goes a long way.
4. Flash Splash Screens.
Flash is big these days and very useful for a lot of tasks, however, one thing you should avoid is a big flash welcome page as the default page of your web site. Most people find it very annoying to sit through it, or to have to click a skip button.
5. Cross Browser Compatible Issues.
Always check out your site on the main browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, Opera) a PC and Mac if possible. You’d be surprised how each web browser has its quirks. Sometimes a page will look really bad or completely wrong in one browser and you’ll have to spend time correcting the problem. But, you won’t know unless you test it… don’t rely on your visitors to tell you.
6. Broken Links.
This one should be obvious, check you site’s navigation and all the links occasionally. There are some tools available to do this for you if you have a really large site.
7. Disjointed Layout.
Make sure your site is easy to navigate. Have someone who’s not familiar with your site use your site. Ask them to purchase something, or find the page for sending in questions, etc. Watch them as they work. Listen to what they have to say and fix your site to make it work better.
8. Incomplete Contact Information.
Keep the contact information on your site is current and complete. Do this as soon as anything changes.
9. Text in Graphics to Make “Pretty Text” vs. Real Text.
Font styles are somewhat limited for web pages. Some people want their site to look really good with fonts like you can use in word processing packages. So how do you do that? You can make it in Adobe PhotoShop or another graphic package and save out your text as images. This works really well as far as looking good, however, because images are naturally larger than text, the pages will load slower. But, the biggest drawback is not size, it’s that you have your text, which tells what your site is about, locked up in images.
It’s not accessible to search engines that crawl web sites.
What does that mean? It means that if you’re relying on traffic to your site from search engines, you want real text, not images of text that only humans can read. If your site is not dependant on search engine traffic, then this may not matter other than the slower load time for the image laden pages.
10. Using Something Just To Be Using It.
When we remodeled our house, I wanted to use some stone somewhere. Our contractor kept saying that if we did, it would look like we used stone just to use some stone; it wouldn’t look natural like a house designed from the start with stone. The same is true of web sites. Don’t use flash, or background sounds, or videos that automatically load and start playing, or JavaScript that opens 900 windows. Only use those things when they are necessary, don’t use them just because you may know how and want to show off.
11. Not Updating the Site.
As things change you should modify your site to reflect those changes. As you add new products or announce new products, you should add them to your site. As people change in your organization, you should update your site.
Put a blog on your site and update it every day or so. Your web site can be a tremendous asset in your marketing toolkit, but only if it’s kept current and fresh.
Use this list of items to make your web site better and more enjoyable for your visitors.
I need to insert a flash or gif advertisment in the computers of my little internet cafe. Not in any web page, Simplily I would like that meantime the customers are working in any page a banner or animated gif or flash crosses the screen advertising my products. How can I do that ?. Somebody said use Visual Basic. But How. I will appreaciate your helpnad HELP PLEASE.
Visual Basic or VB.net would definately be the way to go, i could easily write one but i am pretty sure someone has already written a program like it on one of the developer resource sites. You could check out the following sites for info
http://www.codeproject.com
http://www.planetsourcecode.com
http://www.programmersheaven.com
http://www.codeguru.com
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I want to have gif animated images because I like their unique style and I want to give that to my psp.So how do I get gif animated pictures on my psp? And also when Im on the internet with my psp, I want to be able to watch youtube videos. How do I get that on there?
If you want to use Anitmations for your Theme or Wallpaper, I don't think that is possible, for them to actually animate.
For videos you can try http://www.pspube.com
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Is there any software out there (particularly freeware) that will allow you to break up an animated gif image into single frames?
Very cool question 
Never gave this any thought before so I don't have any personal experience with this. Did a search at sourceforge.net (they have freeware programs) and found this:
http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&type_of_search=soft&words=convert+gif+to+frames
I searched for "convert gif to frames" so maybe you could come up with a better search parameter. I also checked out a favorite media converter (also free) and see that they will convert gif to bmp, jpg, etc. However, I'm not sure if it will convert to all the frames that comprise the gif or just the frame of the gif image that happens to be captured.
http://media-convert.com/
I also found this "how-to" that might be of some help:
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/6774/throbgif.htm
Finally, here's a list of other sites that specialize in collecting freeware / shareware / full price software.
http://www.thefreecountry.com/
http://www.majorgeeks.com/
http://www.download.com/
http://www.softpedia.com/
http://www.snapfiles.com/
http://www.sofotex.com/
http://www.tucows.com/
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Chrisette Michele’s “Be OK”
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