Almost every website has at least one picture on it somewhere. Have you ever considered that this one picture may be making your website slow to load? If you have your colorful picture of beautiful, downtown Melbourne, and you want to add it to your web site design and tell everyone what a great city Melbourne is to visit, if your site takes ten minutes to load, no one will care!
When you are publishing a website you always have the option to go into the HTML code and reduce the size of your picture which will make it show up as a smaller graphic on the screen; however just making your image display in a smaller size may not do much to help your web page load faster, and here is why.
There are several things that determine an image's size. First is the actual size of the picture, and second is the density of the colors. So when you just shrink the image a bit, you really do not make much difference, because the lion's share of the storage requirements have to do with the density of the colors in a photo, or the pixels in the photo.
To actually make your photo load quicker, you need to reduce the number of pixels that the picture is using. How far you reduce the pixels is a judgement call because if you reduce them too far, you will degrade the quality of your photo. If you do not reduce the pixels enough, you will not make your website load faster.
To pare down the size of your photo file, you need a software program, like Photoshop, that lets you change the density of a graphic. Usually about 800x600 is enough of a reduction to maintain the quality of your photo, but it will also save enough memory to allow a website to load quickly. Many professional website designers use this and similar programs.
So when designing your web page design, if you are using photos or graphics, always take a look to see how densely pixilated they are, and if necessary, reduce the number if pixels before publishing.
Now your website will load quickly, and most visitors will never notice a difference at all. Actually they will notice one important difference. Instead of having to wait five minutes for you website to load, it will pop up on their screen almost instantaneously. And by having your web page display quickly when a visitor clicks on your link, you increase your odds of developing a new customer.
If you are interested in getting the most out of your website there are futher techniques such as web site optimisation that are very useful. Remember that your web host will make a difference too, so don't just choose the first one you see- do a quick search for "Web hosting Australia" to see a few different options.