GOVSNET

When developing graphics for your website, it is important to take into account the size of the image to be rendered.  Tools such as Photoshop provide the capability to save a file for the web.  This often assists designers in extracting only the color table information relative to the image and can help reduce the size of images.

It is a good rule of thumb to keep image sizes to less than 30KB per image.  Even with our high speed services there are still issues with speed when downloading pages.

Another design consideration is to eliminate tables when ever possible.  The table must be rendered all at once so all elements of the table must be downloaded from the server before the browser can render the table to the web page.  It is more complicated to create custom CSS to position elements on a page; however, the rendering is much faster.

Keep your site rendering fast by incorporating solid design principles and always test your site on slow connections to see the worst case scenario for your site.