Not everyone in the world has a high-speed internet connection, and even those who do can’t always see web pages where the images are larger than 30KB.

So if you’ve noticed that sometimes it takes longer than you’d like for your site to load; or, if you’ve observed a high bounce rate (you get clicks, but visitors leave quickly), it may be because you need to shrink your image files.

You don’t have to shrink the actual width and height of your images to reduce the size of the files. What you can do instead, is export them to a compressed size - a .jpg or .gif file. I know how to do this in Adobe Fireworks (this is the image editing program that comes with the Dreamweaver suite). If you use other programs such as Photoshop or Gimp, you’ll have to maybe do a Google search on “image compression.”

To find out how large one of your website images is, browse to the page where it’s located on your website. Right-click the image and select Properties. A box will open up where you can view the following elements: File location, height, width, size of file, and alt text.

If the file is larger than 30KB, you definitely want to shrink it. So locate the source of the file on your computer’s hard drive, and open it up in Adobe Fireworks.

Assuming that the width and height of the file is already to scale with what’s on your actual web page, go ahead and export the file to a smaller size. Here’s how to do it.

1. Use the pointer tool to select the image.

2. Go to the top menu and click FILE>EXPORT WIZARD.
A dialog box opens up. Check the box that says TARGET EXPORT FILE SIZE and then type in 30 into the box where it says KB.

3. Click CONTINUE.

4. Under the next prompt, “CHOOSE DESTINATION,” check THE WEB and click CONTINUE.

5. The next prompt says “Fireworks Analysis Results.” Read and make note of this, then click EXIT.

6. Now you’re in the EXPORT PREVIEW area, where you can view how the file will look after it’s compressed. Here, you can opt to switch back and forth from .jpg to .gif so you can see which will appear more clearly. You can also change the quality, smoothing levels, and play around with other elements until you’re satisfied with the way the image looks.

Most of the time though, you don’t have to do anything in this area other than click EXPORT.

7. After you do that, a dialog box will open that prompts you to save the exported file to a predetermined folder on your computer. Make sure you save the file to the same place where you save all images for your website.

8. Once the file’s been exported to the right folder, you need to open up your FTP client (Dreamweaver, in this case). Connect to your server. Switch the view to LOCAL, and then locate the name of the newly shrunken file.

(You want to make sure you select the right file. If you hover over it, you can usually see a label that tells you how large the file is. If it’s 30KB or less, you’ve got the correct file.)

9. “Put” or upload the file to your website server.

10. Finally, open the HTML file where the same image is located in its own form. Delete that image and replace it with the new image that you just compressed. Put the file.

11. Go back to your browser and repeat Step 1, which was right-click the image file to see how large the file is. If it’s less than 30K, your file-shrinking escapade was successful.

Copyright 2008 Dina Giolitto, Wordfeeder.com Copywriting and Marketing. All rights reserved.

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