Porn is all about imagery. You post images on your adult site because that's what you're supposed to do. There are plenty of erotica lovers in this world but when it comes to Internet porn, it's all about the pictures, baby.

At this point in time, your potential audience is composed of half broadband surfers and half dial-up surfers. For those on broadband, download time isn't that much of a problem anymore. For the other half on dial up, load time is everything. While it's wise to optimize images for broadband users, for dial up surfers, image optimization is an absolute necessity.

What is image optimization?

"...if forty seconds have passed and that surfer is still waiting for your logo graphic to download, say goodbye to that surfer. Say goodbye to sales."

Image optimization is the process of minimizing file size while maintaining the best possible quality. On the web, file size equals download time. The bigger your pics, the longer they'll take to download in your surfer's browsers. The longer your surfers wait for your page to download the greater the chance they have to leave. Considering this amazing medium is barely ten years old, web surfers got real picky, real fast. Studies have shown that the average Internet surfer will wait only fifty seconds for the average webpage to load.

In other words, if forty seconds have passed and that surfer is still waiting for your logo graphic to download, say goodbye to that surfer. Say goodbye to sales.

Image file size is ascertained in two ways. There is visible size, the actual dimensions of the image. Image dimensions are measured in pixels. A digital image might be 150x150 pixels in visible size. Then there is the file size. This is the amount of space the image takes up on a server or a disk or a hard drive. As an example, an ad banner might be 10 kilobytes in file size. Visible size counts but it’s the file size of an image that really matters. When you reduce the file size of an image, you speed up the load time of that image.

There’s a few ways to go about decreasing file size. One obvious way is to resize the dimensions of the image, make it smaller visibly. Thumbnail images are basically smaller, resized versions of images with larger dimensions. Resizing a website logo can help reduce file size. Of course, one doesn’t want to make an image too small in dimension because such reduction sacrifices detail.

There are primarily two image formats standardized for the web. GIF and JPG. The difference between the two formats lies in the colors.

A GIF contains no more than 256 colors. Because of this limited palette, GIFs work best for line drawings and images containing minimal detail. Cartoons look good in GIF format. GIFs are great because they can be created with transparent backgrounds. You can’t compress a GIF but you can reduce the color count of a GIF. You’ll lose image integrity if you remove too many colors from a GIF.

A JPG can contain millions of colors. This makes the JPG the superlative format for photo-realistic images. Photographs and images with a lot of detail look best in JPG. JPGs can be made smaller in file size through compression. The drawback to compressing JPGs is that they become blurry if you compress them too much.

You can reduce the file size of an image by resizing its visible dimensions. By using the right format for the image you optimize that image. By removing colors from a GIF you reduce its file size. By compressing a JPEG you reduce its file size. There are several image-editing programs that can perform one or more or all of the functions you need to optimize your images for your adult web site. You will find some great image-editing software on Cozy Frog in our Software / Scripts section and in our Design Tool Box under "IMAGE OPTIMIZERS".

Sometimes the best way to optimize an image for the web is to eliminate that image completely. Do you really need all those menu buttons? You can create sweet menus with tables, fancy font work and cool colors. What about that background wallpaper? Does anybody even have background wallpaper on websites anymore? HTML color tags are your friend. Use them. And while you’re at it, all those cute little animated graphics and decorative horizontal bars, what’s up with those? Give little spot a rest. He’s tired of running back and forth across your page.

You don’t want a boring page but you don’t want to forget that surfers aren’t coming to your porn site for the design. Cut out the unnecessary adornments. Bring your logo down to size. Optimize the images that count and use the right format. You will have a cleaner, faster-loading page. Surfers like that. You’ll like it as well because you’ll be saving money in storage and transfer fees.

Optimize your images and you’ll be optimally happy!