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I’m sorry bye bye this forum has been loading slow for me. I love my slider…its like a free area I can write in that is all self promotion. They can also be salt tagged and if you are like muffin…the names of the slider image files are relevant to online casinos. Last, the slider can act as a valuable internal anchor text that should hold relevance as well.
The negatives are speed, above the fold info if executed poorly.
A slider is a great way to capture visitors attention. It gives the site an up-beat professional feel if done properly.
However some people don’t optimize their images sizes. EG – Using a 500Kb image and having say 6 of these in a slider adds up to 3Meg. Pre-loading or loading on demand with these sizes is moot point. In addition most affiliates are on shared hosting, not like the casinos they’re promoting who use dedicated hosting coupled with a CDN (content delivery network) and other services to deliver a premium user experience.
Google apparently appreciates a fast loading site and it uses this load time in its ranking alog.
I saw a site today where the top header image was 609Kb. Even with my 20Mbit link that images was grinding to load – I can only pull content down as fast as the server it’s hosted on is capable of serving it. I managed to crunch the image down to a 82Kb png | 43Kb jpg and by using the part of the header gradient color I crunch it further to a 23Kb gif.
Not everything has to be *.png or even *.jpg, you can use a *.gif too. But it’s knowing what to use where, which seems to allude a lot of webmasters these days.
I still use Fireworks8 by the defunct Macromedia (bought out by Adobe), they were the original developer of Dreamweaver and Flash if you didn’t know. I know everyone raves about Photoshop but with Fireworks8 you don’t have to worry about layers etc etc it basically separates all those for you.
The point is Fireworks8 was made from the ground up to be used for image manipulation on the web. It has some kick ass tools to crunch images sizes down to a usable level.
Reiterating sliders are a great marketing tool if used effectively but if your images are not optimized and crunched down to a internet usable size your inadvertently increasing your site’s load time up to 10x longer that it needs to be.
A free online image optimizer:
Online Image Optimizer: Optimize your GIFS, JPGS, and PNGS online.I still think Fireworks 8 is the go.
While you can no longer purchase it there are some sites around which still have links to the (30 day) trial version. Given this product version was released back in 2004/2005 by Macromedia and was never actually sold by Adobe, I’m sure you could hunt around for an activation key without getting into trouble. Or contact Adobe and see if they would give you a key.
Anyone interested in checking it our here is a link (anything after XP I don’t think it will work):
Macromedia Fireworks 8 Free Trial DownloadReiterating, this graphics program was specifically developed for web design and internet based graphics.
I’m with Dave, Fireworks 8 is excellent for web graphic work and creating small size images for fast loading web pages. I’ve been using it for years despite the popularity of Photoshop – and it works just fine on my Vista loaded laptop. Not sure about Win7 though.
