Tools For Optimizing Your Site’s Graphics
According to Google, “content is king”. Yes, that’s true to a certain extent, but you can’t discount how important it is to have a well-designed blog, especially if you want to make it successful enough for you to be able to blog full time.
There are lots of areas that come into play when designing a good website layout, but in this article we’re going to focus on the use of graphics and how to use them to have a great-looking website. You have to go beyond simple HTML and CSS and venture into graphic software tools to create, modify, and enhance your blog’s graphics.
When it comes to making graphics, there are two categories of tools: bitmap drawing tools and vector drawing tools, the former being simple to intermediate and the latter being more advanced and designed for professional developers. Here are some good options for website designers:
- Adobe Photoshop. There is not much to add: Photoshop is so widely used that not only does everyone knows exactly what it does, but they also know that it’s the best at what it does.
- Paint Shop Pro. If you can’t afford Photoshop, this is a good option for you. It is almost as versatile as Photoshop, but is much more affordable. It’s the graphics tool of choice for many webmasters.
- Web Graphics Optimizer. This software (which is also a lot more affordable than Photoshop) is a great image optimization tool (it allows for up to five different image versions); whatever you need in terms of size and image quality can be handled quite adequately, so you can give your site that polished look.
- I can’t omit G.I.M.P. but since it’s basically an open source version of Photoshop I figured there was no need to really elaborate on it.
Any one of these tools will totally do the job for your site’s graphics. But there are two final words of caution I always like to throw out: 1) don’t get so hung up on pretty layouts that you never launch your site and 2) don’t make your graphic files so big that they cause your site to take forever to load!