Increase Website Load Speed With Neat Little Trick

I was looking into this a while back and it just popped back up in my mind again. To reduce bandwidth and page load times some websites will place a majority of their images in a single image and use it as if it were a tile sheet.

Example: http://www.google.com/images/nav_logo8.png

Using some a certain combination of CSS properties you can crop out unneeded parts of the image.

Example:

.next-button {

     cursor: pointer;

     background-image: url(tilesheet.png);

     background-position: 32px 0px;

     width: 16px;

     height: 16px;

}

Pretty cool stuff no doubt. It obviously not worth it for smaller sites considering the amount of work it would take to get it setup. But it's always an option for bulky high traffic sites. Keep in mind this is just one out of a thousand techniques Google uses to give you those quick loading pages.

-Posted By Foremost Media Staff Member Kevin W.

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Easy Image Resizing with the Web Resizer

As a web developer, I regularly open a website to see the images on the page slowly load line by line. I immediately know what has happened and think about the day that I will write a blog post about how to resize images for the web. Well, today is the day that I write the post.

The Problem: Large Images

Uploading images from a digital camera will put unnecessarily large images on your site. Today's digital cameras generally produce images that are well over 2000 pixels wide and over 2 megabytes in size. When these images are uploaded at full size to a web page and then displayed at 300 pixels wide, the web browser will scale the picture down to the width, but it is still loading the entire full-sized file. Place two or three of these huge image files on a web page and the page load time will increase drastically.

The Solution: Resized and Web Optimized Images

When placing photos on your web page, you should resize your photos to fit the space that you want them to take up on the page. A web page with optimized and resized images will load much more quickly and the smaller image files will still look as good as their larger siblings.

How does one resize/optimize images for the web?

While Photoshop is a great tool for completing this task, it is expensive and there is a learning curve involved in becoming proficient at it. Thankfully, there are plenty of free and easy to use options available for resizing and optimizing images. Of all that I have seen and used, none has impressed me as much as the online web resizer found at http://webresizer.com/resizer. This is an awesome tool that is extremely easy to use. The site allows you to resize and crop your images and they also provide some basic editing functions to help you get your images looking good quickly. One of my favorite features is the ability to quickly add rounded corners to an image.

This is not an efficient tool for processing a large number of images, but if you only need to resize a few photos for a page you are developing, this is a great option. Another plus is that you do not need to install anything to make it work. Everything is done inside of your web browser.

Take a few minutes to check out the Web Resizer and bookmark it for the next time you need to add images to your site.

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Switching to our email hosting has never been easier

If you are thinking about moving your hosting to us and one of your concerns is losing emails in the process, have no fear. We now have the ability to easily transfer your email accounts to our hosting environment from many popular email providers. We can help migrate your email from Exchange 2007, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail Plus, IMAIL and others.

Contact your current system administrator if you are unsure which mail server type you are using.

Learn more about our hosting options here:
http://tinyurl.com/fm-hosting-info

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Google Bot Feeds On Bread Crumbs

Google has recently started to return bread crumbs as clicable results on some of their search results pages (SERPS).  The program is still new and according to Googles Matt Cutts and what you are seeing now may change down the road.  The neat thing for webmasters is that it provides more links to your site from the SERPS page on Google.  At this point all that is needed to get Google to display bread crumbs with your search results is you need bread crumbs on your site with a consistent deliminator between them and the bread crumbs should reflect your sites hierarchy.

Remember bread crumbs aren't a magic bullet for SEO but it is my belief that every website should have them regardless of there effect on your search results.  Breadcrumbs help improve the user experience on your site especially if your site is pretty deep.

Here is what Matt had to say about the topic:

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Writing A Good Title Tag For SEO

Writing Good Title Tags For Search Engine Optimization

It amazes me how many companies are not taking full advantage of their title tags or not formatting their title tags properly. If your page is all about branding your company name then put the company name at the front of the title tag, but if your page is trying to capture traffic for a specific phrase like "Thermal Dynamic Techno Funk" you want the key phrase at the front of your title tag.

Missed Opportunity:  XYZ Company-  Leader in Thermal Dynamic Techno Funk

Properly Formatted:  Thermal Dynamic Techno Funk Information XYZ Company

Title Tags are one of the most important elements on your page so use it well.  For the most part, your company is going to show up well on the search engines because it's all over your site.

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Can you guranatee to get us on the first page of google?

Here is what Google Says About Ranking Guarantees: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. Beware of SEO's that claim to guarantee rankings."


- Google's SEO Tips

At Foremost Media we have a great track record of providing top rankings for our clients and we can guarantee that your project will be completed in a ethical and honest manor and with the same attention to detail that we have used in the past to deliver excellent results to our other SEO clients. Our results with our past and current clients are our guarantee that we have had great success with search engine optimization.
I am confident that we can help your company generate more leads through the search engines. Remember that the search engine optimization projects are a collaboration between our companies. We will defiantly need input from you and your team as we move forward. The more involved in the process your group is the better the results. Our job is to help you tailor your content to both the search engines and the surfer to help you not only be found but also generate more leads for your business.

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Microsoft Warns that Internet Explorer 6 is Flawed...

This week Microsoft has admitted that its Internet Explorer 6 browser that is running on Windows 2000 and Windows XP computers has flawed code that contributes to a security hole in the software that was recently used in attacks on Google in China.

Microsoft is now urging users who have not yet upgraded from IE6 to consider upgrading to a new version of Internet Explorer. Upgrades from Internet Explorer 6 have been freely available from Microsoft for several years, but Microsoft has refused to force users to upgrade.

Do you think that these security holes will be motivation enough to cause users who have not upgraded in the last 3-4 years to take the leap now?

Read more about this story here...

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