Show Us Your Xtreme 4 created Website!

[pauland]

Yes you're right Paul - though they load pretty quickly here (on an empty cache), I admit slower connections would make them slower to load.
I just changed the banners to jpg (39.8KB now).
The popup photos with drop shadows have to be PNG I'm afraid.
At least popups are optional.

Thanks for looking

Sledger, some of your small images are taking 250K in png format. If you switch them to jpg/gif you will take 200K off the download for the four small pictures.

I can see no/very little difference in quality. My connection is cable broadband 512K.

The attached images are from DrillNorth: http://drillnorth.com.au and are only intended to show the ability to optimise the images. Sledger, feel free to remove the attachments if you wish - all copyright remains with the original copyright owner.

Paul

[ss-kalm]

Paul,

Xara won't use GIF so all the time and effort that you save will be expended changing all the graphics round.

John, (Covoxer) said that the Xara PNG files are 32bpp and that we should request 8bpp but not GIF.

I personally don't understand why a website creation tool wouldn't use the smallest file size generator. I don't think we'll see any appreciable difference from 32bpp to 8bpp when we are only viewing at 96dpi, and the speed difference (and file sizes) will be noticable.

[handrawn]

John has pointed out elsewhere that gradients can appear banded at 8bit and that the transparency is not plagued by jaggies at 32bit - its horses for courses.....

[pauland]

Paul,

Xara won't use GIF so all the time and effort that you save will be expended changing all the graphics round.

John, (Covoxer) said that the Xara PNG files are 32bpp and that we should request 8bpp but not GIF.

I personally don't understand why a website creation tool wouldn't use the smallest file size generator. I don't think we'll see any appreciable difference from 32bpp to 8bpp when we are only viewing at 96dpi, and the speed difference (and file sizes) will be noticable.

Well, it doesn't take very long to optimise the file sizes - I think it's well worth the effort. It's a pity that Xtreme (HTML generation) doesn't allow the choice of file exports to include jpg, but then again what it does do is pretty good.

Paul

[gwpriester]

Paul and others

This is the first time out of the box for HTML exports. I would expect to see a lot of improvements soon. We are the testers here and our feedback is important to help Xara refine and improve this capability.

I tried out the suggestion to select all objects you want to export as JPEG, including one with a soft shadow over a gray background, and then naming them all at once as JPEG with the Create New Names (the yellow tag icon), and it worked perfectly. Even though each image is named JPEG they each export separately and the file size is greatly reduced. The drop shadow over the gray page background was very sharp and clean.

Gary

[hamishmacd]

With the exception of the photographs this site was made entirely in Xara.

guestwishes.com

Sorry for not hyperlinking but this is a new site and Google picks up on hyperlinks really quickly.

[pauland]

snip - post is irrelevant

[covoxer]

I don't think we'll see any appreciable difference from 32bpp to 8bpp when we are only viewing at 96dpi, and the speed difference (and file sizes) will be noticable.

The average difference in size of the 8bpp GIF and 32bpp PNG is about 2 times in case of lineart images. Assuming that there are also some other files in the page including photo images, switching from 32bpp PNG to 8 bpp GIF will usually reduce overall download size by 1.5-2 times. Such difference can be noticed only in direct comparison. You wouldn't recognize whether the site is exported with PNG or GIF simply by opening it once.

As I've said before, and as is demonstrated here, the really significant difference in size is achieved by using JPEG instead of PNG/GIF for the photorealistic images. This provide about a 10 times size decrease of the image with minor visible quality decrease. But it provides poor results (both size and quality) for lineart, and it has no transparency support. That's why it's best to select export format manually.

Currently you can select which of these two export formats to use for every exported image. This covers the most significant optimisations of the exported design. More subtle tuning, like JPEG compression level or PNG color mode is not possible in current version.

[jen0dorf]

Hi

without in any way being critical as an avid web site designer ( User of Dreamweaver CS3) can I suggest that having valid html code is important.

I quick purusal of some of the code in the web sites listed does show some errors which can stop search engine robots and some browsers from displaying pages correctly.

Take a look at

http://www.htmlvalidator.com/

there is a trial version which can be used to check code and provide solutions

HTH everyone

Ian

[steve.ledger]

Sledger, some of your small images are taking 250K in png format.

Paul those small images you picked out, none of them are over 250K as PNG?

3.png = 52.4KB / 5.png = 52.7KB / 6.png = 48.6KB / 8.png = 89KB

There are 3 popup PNG's on other pages that do exceed 250KB, but as stated, due to the use of alpha-transparency only PNG can be used. Waiting for popups is however entirely optional (although I would prefer OnClick rather than MouseOver - John?).

512K connection isn't the fastest I agree, flash,youtube videos and other streaming media suffers a bit at connections lower than around 1.5mbit ADSL1