Continued from..

Say you are doing a 20 pic free site and your images are not compressed very well. Let's say they are 60kb each which is not all that uncommon if you look around at some free sites. Over the course of a month that site gets 20,000 hits with all the pics downloaded each time. You are paying your host $3.00/GB.

If you had taken the time to compress your pics a little better you would have spent only half that $$ on bandwidth. That's like getting a sign-up for free. This is just an example and doesn't include your thumbs or HTML pages but keep in mind that this is for one site only. There is a multiplication factor involved once you get building more sites and it really starts to add up.

It would be good to check the file sizes on the banners you are using as well. Some sponsor banners can be upwards of 30k or more which is very large. A word of caution however. The banners look the way they do for a reason, to get clicks and make you and your sponsors $$$. DO NOT degrade the image quality of your sponsor's banners and really it would be best to check with them before you modify their work in any way.

It is possible to take a banner that's 20k and reduce the file size by almost half with no noticeable change in image quality.

By now you should have a good idea why it's important to compress your pics. I have a couple tutorials based on two of the most popular programs that are recommended by the people at VNWR. Most people tend to prefer one or the other for different reasons. You can try them both for free so why not find out which one works best for you. Choose your weapon:

Irfanview SuperJPG

I hope you have found this little page to be helpful.

Freeballer