Speed Up Your Web Site By Using CSS Sprites

CSS

If you own a web site or blog, chances are you have thought about how to make your pages load as fast as possible. This is an obsession with many, while a learning experiencing for others. I am one of those that look for ways to make my blog display faster. I have tried and used many different tactics, including changing settings for the browser cache, gzip compression, WordPress caching plugins, reducing the number of graphics, and reducing the number of third-party widgets that appear on my blog. The more that has to load, the slower a page will become.

When I created this new WordPress theme, I wanted to try something new – CSS sprites. CSS sprites are used by some of the larger web sites to reduce the number of image downloads that are needed to display a web page. While I am not an expert by any means, I have managed to get some of the common images that appear on this blog to load from an image sprite.

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My Thoughts on Web Page Designs

For those that have been reading Technically Easy for some time, you may have noticed that I modify my blog design every few months. Since switching over to WordPress, however, I have kept the same template, with a few modifications. In the past week, I have been creating a new blog design from scratch, and have thought about some of the design issues that I have seen online.

In this post I will talk about my thoughts on Web page designs, and what I think are common issues with many designs in use today.

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Creating Clickable Web Site Header Images

I like to write posts that can help others complete a task, whether it is with computers, web sites/blogs, networking, or digital photos. Some times, I come across questions that get asked on a frequent basis. While the questions may seem to be simple to answer for some, I also realize that many people don’t have the technical knowledge others may have acquired through the years.

This post is going to talk about creating header images for a web site or blog, and how to make them link back to a home page. If you are new to HTML, creating such an image is very easy to do.

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Photo and Image Editors

As I visit web sites one thing that always get my attention is the amount of time it takes to complete a page download. With web sites using more images to display the content, it can at times take much longer than necessary to finish downloading a page.

The biggest problem with the sites that do use a lot of images on each page is the size of the images. Some who manage web sites don’t realize that images need to be resized outside of the browser to decrease the download size. Specifying the size of an image in the HTML code will only shrink the displaying of the image, not the actual size. To shrink the file sizes you will need an image editor. In this post I will list a few image editors that can be used to edit your images for your web site.

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Check Web Browser Compatibility for Your Website

When you are designing a web site it is important to always test the design in many browsers. The reason for this is that different browsers may display your web site in different ways.

It has always been a difficult task to test your web site design in many browsers and many versions of the different browsers. To help with this there is a web site that can do this all for you, and provide screenshots of your web site as it is viewed in the browsers.

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What to Avoid When Designing Web Sites

I enjoy using Entrecard on a daily basis. It allows me to find new blogs that I would have never have visited without going through Entrecard. At the same time I also find blogs that I would never visit again, not because of the content, but because of how they are designed. In this post … Read more

Getting Colour Values from Web Site Templates

Many of us aren’t the greatest Web site designers, or just don’t have time to design one, and because of this we rely on templates that others have created. The only problem with this is we may not understand how the entire Web site is designed with regards to files used and the layout of … Read more

Introduction to HTML

I recently wrote two posts regarding designing Web sites: Designing Web Pages: Tables or CSS and Introduction to Cascading Stylesheets (CSS). The information presented in both of those articles may be advanced for those just starting out with creating Web pages.

I decided to create this post to provide an introduction to HTML and create a Web page. This post will create a very simple Web page that you can then display in a Web browser.

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