Lesson 10 - Crunching Images and 3D Text

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Internet Marketing for High School Teachers
at
Old Dominion University

You've read by now just what a crime it is to make your page too large. It's terrible! Someone recently sent me a high school site that was really awesome. However, even with a cable modem it took me about 15 seconds to download the page. I checked it, and the page was 395K large. AGH! If you remember, keeping your page size under 50K is very important, even smaller if possible. A 395K page takes 123.04 seconds to download with a 33.6 Kbs modem, and 95.19 seconds on a 56 K modem. YIKES! Given the fact that the average person will not wait more than 20 seconds for any given page, I wonder just how many people will ever see their full home page.*** Would YOU wait that long?

One of the biggest favors you can do for yourself is to minimize the size of your images. What are some of the images on this page? The OTS 596 above, the oval keyboard cutaway, the buttons to the left, the "Keeping Busy" above, and the "Next" button at the bottom could all benefit from being shrunk or "crunched." The odds are that you can do it and your visitor will never know the difference. Take a look at the two images below:


Banjo 1	Banjo 2

Can you see a difference? If you look really close, you can. There is a bit more detail in Banjo 1 than in Banjo 2. However, it certainly won't make a difference to most viewers. No on will ever notice!

The size of Banjo 1 = 12.6 K. The size of Banjo 2 = 5.8 K, less than half of the size. If you were to get that kind of reduction on every image on every page, that would make a huge difference, and there's no reason not to! If you have the vision of a hawk and the difference is very noticeable to you, you can decide on a crunched image somewhere between Banjo 1 and Banjo 2.

Be aware that placing an image on your site and then resizing it by appearance does not reduce its size in kilobytes! Either you have to reduce the image size before you put in on your page, you have to crunch it, or both.

As far as crunching your image, there are many software programs available to do this, but there are some online tools that will do it for you for free. Send your students to Spinwave. Let your students crunch their images, and let your "faster" students crunch some of the images for your more methodical students as they continue to forge ahead with their work.

***(Web site Garage, May 2001)

3D TEXT AND IMAGES

You like those 3D headings and buttons with shadows and all of the stuff that makes your site look good. There are tons of software packages that will do that for you, but you've got an entire class to consider! Fear not, there are also plenty of freebies.

Here is a sample:

This particular logo was made at Flaming Text, a very cool site that I picked up from a former student, but there are LOTS of sites that will create 3D text, images, buttons, and banners for you. There will be a hotlinks page at the end of this lesson for you to start using with links to sites like this one!

Put your students to work, not only for themselves, but for their colleagues. Is this busy work? I think not!

Workshop | Project 1 | Resources

Contact Mickey Kosloski at mkoslosk@odu.edu