Finally dropping by Missouri State campus to kickoff HighEdWeb 2008, we were welcomed to some upgraded scwag, wifi necessities, and our introductory workshops for us lucky few who arrived early and could afford this unique sessions.

I was fortunate to catch Derek Tonn last year in Rochester and was floored by his presentation on “Graphics Optimization for the Web: Advanced Tools and Techniques”

Needless to say, this is not your mom’s “Save for Web” in photoshop 3 hour workshop; instead opting to delve into the nitty gritty and occasionally command line wage war on the file size of your images.

By the most impressive aspect, is the ability to take staple images in your design and reduce thier filesize by nearly 60-90% in most cases with these techniques – now why would you want to do this?

  1. Traffic Spikes – Your team just won the BCS championship ( ChasetheHeisman.com ;) , or campus-wide emergency occurs, or you’ve become the latest target of DOS attack. Regardless the reason, when your site get slammed you want to have the lowest filesize footprint to quickly serve your audience and your image files are largest offenders of bloat of your web pages.
  2. Broadband IS NOT everywhere – while adoption rates in the US of broadband connections continues to rise, you still have an audience in rural areas still on dailup and espcially the international crowd looking at your instutituion (and yes some of them use IE6). We design our website to be accessibile for the lowest common denomonator – that includes the download size of your website too.
  3. $torage $pace – It doesn’t matter wether you host internally or with a vendor, filesize does equal cold hard cash to your IT staff hosting your website. Imagine your photo library of 3,000 images at 800k per image that’s 240g. Now cut that by 60% and your under 100g. It may be pennies, but every cent counts in High Ed.

So let’s look at some of the helpful tools to get you there, mind you I reccomend using this for your graphic designers and web developers – I would not reccomend use of these applications to your content owners. I will be doing a followup post this week on useful tips and software geared toward the end user.

  • XAT Image Optimizer (Windows Only) – This handy tool does all the heavy lifting, from removing exif, meta, to very robust zonal compression to work over your JPGs and GIFS.
  • ImageMagick (Mac/Win/Lin) – Unfortunately for Mac users, ImageMagick is going to be the closest all purpose tool for downsizing your image tool.
  • Flash Optimizer (Mac/Win) – Even your cumbersome SWF files can sqeeze into that size 0 website of yours. This optimizer inspects the various audio, video, photos, shapes, and ActionScript to condese your finished flash file even further.

More to come later… now it’s time to dash. For complete details and tutorials, be sure and visit Derek’s site at

http://graphicsoptimization.com/