He didn't seem to mind but some of the members of his site who were on dialup modems were complaining.

The first thing to check was the size of the page.

I saved the front page of his site and then looked at the image sizes that went along with that page.

The result?

He had over 300k of graphics on the front page of the site. That is way too much.

Fixing The Problem

Luckily the fix is easy. It is simply a matter of compressing the photos a bit better. I know that not everyone is up for buying a graphics or image compression program and that's fine. Its not particularly necessary if you want to use a free image optimizer program.

I have recently added a program to the download area of this site. It is the free JPGCompress program.

It is simple, straight forward and it works.

You simply open the picture in JPGCompress and then move the compression level at the top of the screen. You can instantly see what the results are to the picture.

Not only can you see the visual results, but the bottom of the screen shows you the resulting file size.

In this picture below, I was able to compress it from the original 113K down to 18K with acceptible results:

What you want to avoid is over compressing the photo as shown below.

If you look around the girls face and wrists. You will see a grainy quality called pixelation or compression artifacts.

The bottom line?

Its over compressed. On the plus side, it did bring the photo down to 10K.

Other Features

In addition to the instant visual results on the screen, there are other options as well.

• resizing the photos by either dimension sizes or percentages
• indication of loading time based on various connection speeds

JPGCompressis a great little program to have handy. It may not have every bell and whistle as other programs but it is still worth having around.

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