To have a successful and eye-pleasing website, you usually need to include graphic elements that may cause the overall page size of the website to download slowly. This may frustrate your visitors, causing them to click away before they even get to the heart of your information. If your users have a fast Internet connection, this may not cause any problems, but there are plenty of people (potential customers and clients) surfing the web who are not equipped with the latest in speedy Internet connections. You don’t want to alienate your less-than-high bandwidth users away from your site.

Simple graphic optimization techniques can remedy this problem, allowing you to have an attractive website that can load easily on any computer with an average Internet connection. Efficient slicing is one of the easiest ways to minimize the downloading time of the images on your website. Slicing your images into separate parts that each receive html coding that are then put back together on your webpage will reduce the load time of your website.

Efficient slicing optimizes your website for faster viewing:

* Large slices that contain many different colors increase your load time. Use smaller slices that contain fewer amounts of colors.
* A gradient color background can be sliced into smaller portions and duplicated in the code.
* GIF files can help to reduce the size of your webpage. JPEG files should be used with slices that contain many colors and GIF files should be used with slices that contain fewer colors.
* Do not slice text that has a solid color background. The background should be created with code. Using CSS or CSS2 programming, you can easily define the background color and the font style.

Optimizing your website with proper coding will give your website the advantage of being able to be viewed correctly and quickly on any computer with a decent Internet connection. An optimized website will represent your company as a cutting-edge calling card for your business. When people surf the Internet, they want instant results. Optimizing your website will increase the load time of your website for your viewers, before they can click away to the competition.