Tools and Tips on how to Optimize Images for the Web

The time a page takes to load is something every designer worries about, or at least is something that every designer should worry about. It doesn’t matter if the layout is nice and beautiful if it doesn’t function properly. Since images can be pretty heavy, this is certainly an issue to keep an eye on. And this is why today we gathered a few links here to show you some tools and articles that will help you with this issue. Even if you are a pro at “saving as better quality jpg” it is always nice to check out some tools (old or new) to have you covered when it is time to optimize images.

Useful Tools

TinyPNG

TinyPNG uses smart lossy compression techniques to reduce the file size of your PNG files.

Smush.it

Smush.it uses optimization techniques specific to image format to remove unnecessary bytes from image files.

OptiPNG

OptiPNG is a PNG optimizer that recompresses image files to a smaller size, without losing any information.

ImageOptim

ImageOptim optimizes images — so they take up less disk space and load faster — by finding best compression parameters and by removing unnecessary comments and color profiles. It handles PNG, JPEG and GIF animations.

CodeKit

CodeKit helps you build websites faster and better. And it also helps you optimizing images.

imgo

Image optimization tool.

jQuery Lazyload

jQuery plugin for lazy loading images.

(source WDL)

Anatomy of the Toolbox

 The toolbox in Photoshop is split up into 4 unique categories so that finding the right tool is never a hassle.

HTML5 Demos to Make You Forget About Flash

You’ve probably been hearing a lot lately about how Flash is a dying technology and how it’ll soon be replaced by HTML5. Personally, I think that it will slowly replace Flash for some things, but Flash will always have a place, especially for developing complex games and rich internet applications. If you’ve yet to see what HTML5 can do, I’ve rounded up 10 demos that show off some of its capabilities.

So what do you think – will HTML5 replace Flash?

Useful Resources to Help You Learn HTML5

Even though HTML5 is relatively new and it’s not supported yet by all major browsers, it is being used now by a lot of web designers and developers. Without a doubt, HTML5 is going to play a big part in the way we develop on the web, for many years to come. As I just mentioned, many people are using it now, but there are also many of you out there that hasn’t touched it yet. Now is a good time to start learning it. So, in order to give you a helping hand with that task, we’ve rounded up 7 Useful Resources to Help you Learn HTML5.

Useful 8 CSS Tools

Writing better CSS is something all web designers and developers should strive for, and thankfully there are some useful tools out there to help do just that. For this post, we’ve rounded up a collection of new tools to help you with your CSS. From learning new CSS3 properties, to making your code more efficient, there’s bound to be a few tools here you will find useful.

HTML5 Cheat Sheets

HTML5 Tags Cheat Sheet

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HTML5 Cheat Sheet By InMotion Hosting – A Virtual Private Servers Provider

HTML5 Event Handler Content Attribute Cheat Sheet

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HTML5 Cheat Sheet By InMotion Hosting – A Web Hosting Provider

HTML5 Browser Support Cheat Sheet

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HTML5 Cheat Sheet By InMotion Hosting – A Dedicated Server Provider

Recommend 10 Online HTML5 Tools For Web Designers

HTML5 Background Information

For those of you who are new to HTML5, here is some quick background information to get you up to speed.

• HTML5 is the new language for presenting content on the Internet (at the time of writing this article it is still in beta but soon to be released in 2012).
• HTML5 brings new features making it easy to incorporate video, audio, fonts, drag & drop, web graphics & animations into your web pages.
• HTML5 is backwards compatible to don’t worry about your old designs in HTML 4 or XHML1 they will work just the same!
• jQuery has started killing Flash, HTML5 will finish it off for sure.