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Archive for optimize

Open Links to Other Sites in a New Tab/Window

August 17th, 2015

chainWhen you add a link to your website to another OUTSIDE website, it’s best practice to have that link open in another tab/window. This allows YOUR site to stay open for the user, increasing the likelihood that they will continue looking around on your site after they finish with the link that opened.

Keeping people on your website will not only increase the chance that they will learn more about you and perhaps connect with you in the future – it also has a positive impact on your search engine (Google) rankings.

For links that are WITHIN your website – say, from the Home page to the About page – you should leave the link in its default state, opening in the same browser tab and window. You want to encourage a user to click around from page to page in your site, and opening a new tab or window for every click would be incredibly annoying!

Whether a link opens in a new tab or a new window is determined by the settings that an individual user has made to their browser. Website managers can set links to open in what ever “new” option the user has chosen.

How to set a link in WordPress to open in a new tab or window:

WP Link popupSetting a link to open in a new tab/window in WordPress is easy!  When you are creating a new link, simply tick the check box under the title bar titled “Open link in a new window/tab”.  That’s it!

The hardest part is that the next time you open the Insert/edit link popup, the “Open link a new window/tab” will be checked by default.  You will want to develop the habit of making sure this box is checked/unchecked as needed.  Staying on your own site: unchecked; taking the user to another website: checked.

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Optimize Images

March 23rd, 2015

picmonkeyPhotos and image files can be large and take a long time to download.  When you use really large files like this on your webpages, then it slows down the loading of your site for users.

Making your site faster to load is not only about not frustrating your users– Google and other search engines use site speed as one factor in how high your site will rank in searches.

Be sure to “optimize” images (make small for the web) before you upload them to your site.

You don’t have to be a Photoshop wizard to do this!  One great (and free!) tool for doing this is Picmonkey.com. You don’t need to create an account – just upload, make changes to your image, and download it back to your computer.

To quickly and easily make your image optimized for the web, choose “Resize” on Picmonkey, and make the width (in pixels) of your image somewhere between 200px and 300px. The ratio should be locked, so that the height also will diminish.

When you send the image back to your computer, choose the lowest quality, aiming to get your image sized down to 30 kB or less. Even a fairly large photo on your page should be more than 50 kB.

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Tip for Preparing Photos for a Slide Show

June 10th, 2014

SlideshowYou want to have an image slideshow on your website. Before you can add those images to the slideshow plugin however, you need to format the images so that they are not only optimized for the web, but also so that they are exactly the same size in width and height.

If you are a novice at working with images, here’s a tip for quickly creating a group of images that are all the same size:

Use blank PowerPoint slides, and put each image for your slideshow on its own slide in PowerPoint. Crop and otherwise edit the image on the slide, paying attention to how the slide looks in the PowerPoint show, not any “overhang” of the image.

When you have all the images into a PowerPoint slideshow, and are satisfied with how this show looks, in PowerPoint click on File – Export. Choose “Change File Type” and scroll down to choose JPEG.  This option will export every slide presentation as its own .jpg file, all of them being exactly the same size.

You may still need to optimize these images for the web, and this is most easily accomplished by resizing all of the images to the same smaller width that you need in your slideshow.

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