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We are giving away some secrets to help you melt away some unnecessary seconds of download time! Many countries don't even have the luxury of DSL, so many of your visitors may still be using ordinary 56K - or slower - modems! Therefore, we have provided you with the means to make your site easily accessible, by following the simple steps illustrated below:

How to optimize your website's download speed:

Graphics:

• As a general guideline, if it's drawn clipart or graphics, use GIF format (You can reduce the amount easily without quality loss). If you are using photos or rich, large graphics, use JPG format.
• Try to minimize on the amount of graphics you use on each page.
• Use HEIGHT and WIDTH specifications. The browser will size the image using the specifications and save valuable downloading time.
• If you have a particularly large image, enclose the image in a table and splice up the image into smaller parts.
• Use smaller images and/or apply compression utilities to your images before uploading.
• Avoid using unnecessary animation or gimmicky effects unless absolutely necessary. Forms of animation that fall into this category includes Flash, Java, Multi-frame GIF animations, etc.
• Use the cache efficiently by using the same images throughout the site, and reference to them in one directory. By doing so, the image will be placed in the cache the next time the image is requested and will load much quicker.
• Use "pre-loading" scripts to load your images.

Coding:

• Did you know that "empty spaces" in your HTML code cause your pages to take longer to load? They are not necessary; removing them may in some cases cut the download time in half!
• Excessive use of tables, applets, special effects or overuse of java scripts should be avoided.
• Use proper coding: Many WYSIWYG editors will not write HTML 4.0 correctly. (Not closing "tags", Missing "alt" tags, etc.) Try to correct those using W3C HTML Validation Service. (See validation)
• Rather use cascading style sheets (CSS) to set Font Face, size and colors. Specifying fonts for each paragraph, table or cell requires more characters in your HTML codes.
• Remove unnecessary codes. If you use style sheets (CSS) to make things "bold" for instance, you do not not need to make them bold <B>text</B> in your HTML.

Miscellaneous:

• Avoid too much advertising such as banners, buttons etc.
• Pop-up pages are not only annoying they slow your download time!
• Find a reliable, fast host to publish your site. Better even, get your own domain. Many free web hosts have millions of websites published, one of the main reasons why their client' sites are virtually inaccessible during peak hours.
• Music and sound slow web pages to a crawl.
• Careful when you use frames. Each frame count as one page, so please don't use too many. Frames may also be a timesaver.... if used correctly.

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