Web Design: First Day

Every Thursday i am taking part in a web design course at Grimsby College.

Today I have resarched 5 websites:

www.gamefaqs.com
www.youtube.com
www.ebay.com
www.bbc.co.uk
www.wikipedia.org

For each website I answer the following questons:




"What are your first thoughts about the website?"
"What is the website about, who is it aimed at?"
"What is the mix of text/images?"
"What do you like/dislike about the site?"
"Is it easy to navigate around?"
"Are there any advertising or links on the site? Are they relevant?"

When i had finished this I moved on to some work in photoshop, Optimising images for web.
I used a .png format picture of a rubber duck, ("ducky") and opened it in the Photoshop application. I then used the "save for web" button and changed the optimisation setting to the preset .jpeg(low) This reduced the original 800kb image to a much smaller 7.947 kb image, and when i used the 2-up option, i could see that the change had caused no visible quality loss. I then saved the image like this as a copy of the original image.

Optimising images for web is very important when adding them to a website. Original images take much to long to load on certain web pages, saving for web is the best way to combat this. it reduces fie size significantly with no quality loss on -screen. However if I were to print off the picture, it would be pixelated.
Optimised images therefore take less time to load and will be displayed quicker.