professional image for your business means your web site design must be professional also.

Part one of this article discussed when to use images for your web site and what image file formats to use on Web (www.isitebuild.com/imageoptimization1). In this article (Part

2), we will discuss how to optimize your images for Web.

Image optimization is art of making your images suitable for Web. There is a large difference in preparing your graphics for print compared to Web. In print you have to have as much data as possible to get a good graphic. The main factors that influence display of graphics for Web, are size of file and screen display quality of graphic.

Factors Affecting Web Graphics

1. File Size When you design web pages you need to create a balance between visual appeal and page download time. If your page has too many images on it, it will take too long too load and visitors will not stay around to wait.

2. Cropping This means cutting out unwanted areas of your image. It decreases file size and helps visitors to focus on your image.

3. Anti-aliasing Jagged edges of an image can be prevented by anti-aliasing. This creates a blended edge around an image. Because of extra colors necessary to create blend,

file sizes of anti-aliased GIFs are a little larger. Use anti-aliased graphics in almost all cases, except when

creating very small type as graphics.

4. Bit Depth and Screen Resolution Bit depth refers to number of colors in an image or number of colors a computer system is capable of displaying. To calculate bit depth, one bit equals 2 colors, then multiply 2 times 2 to arrive at each higher bit depth. Quality and file

size decrease as bit-depth decreases.

New computers support thousands or millions of colors (32-bit), but many older color systems can only show up to 256 (8-bit) colors at a time. This reality imposes limits on size of files and number of colors that can be included in Web graphics.

Nobody could have believed it at that time, but these yesterday's dreams have become reality of today. In eyes of many advertisers and webmasters, pop-ups have shaken off their dirty past and are now considered to be quite acceptable and harmless. Rather than result of general Internet population starting to see pop-ups in a better light, this change in attitude is more a case of making a virtue out of a necessity.

As everyone knows by now, large dot-com's are in trouble and need cash. The continuing decrease in click-through rates of banner ads has reduced demand for banner space, and it is clear that sites that live off advertising need something to replace this drying income stream. At same time, an increasing amount of evidence seems to indicate that pop-up advertisements are more likely to be noticed and generate more sales than banner ads. Thus, it is no surprise that pop-ups have been able to break out of dark side into mainstream.

Follow leader? ==================

After pop-ups started to appear on major websites, many webmasters of small- and middle-sized sites have begun to consider following in footsteps of big guys. After all, we've all heard countless success stories, and users have probably already become accustomed to pop-ups and...