Lesson #11 Website Optimization
Written By Titmowse

Experienced radio deejays can tell whether or not a song will become a best seller from hearing it's first four measures. They will tell you if the tune doesn't win the listener over in the first few beats, the song will not make the hit list.

Internet sites are a lot like songs on the radio. If you don't like the song that's playing, you can switch the station. If a surfer doesn't like your site, they can find one they do like elsewhere. Song decisions and website decisions are made in a matter of seconds. The fastest way to get users to click their "back" buttons is by creating a page with slow load time.

A web page should take no longer than 30 seconds to fully download on a 56K connection. Internet surfers are an impatient lot and begin to get nervous when a page downloads slowly. They have no desire to waste their time or machine resources on a silly web page when so many others are out there. Porn surfers are even more impatient. Many times smut searchers are rushed by the confines of their daily lives. They might be at work where every second counts when browsing for booty. They could be at home hiding in the den while their spouse sleeps, hoping they find something fast before the dog's barking wakes up the wife. They may just want as much smut as they can absorb in a session before their butt falls asleep.

From a porn surfer's point of view, a slow loading side is a forgotten site.

The biggest files on any web page are usually the image files. Some applets, flash files and badly coded rotating scripts might lag load times but image files are the most common reason. Optimizing the graphics on your adult site is imperative to its prosperity.

When one considers images on an adult page, one should delineate between graphics and content. Naturally, you want to provide images that are large and clear enough for surfers to be teased but you don't want to lose money by serving large files or images that compete with those of your sponsor.

You probably already know multitudinous adult webmasters save image size by making thumbnailed galleries or by linking to images instead of posting them all on one page. What a considerable amount of adult site builders fail to recognize are the load times of the decorative graphics on their pages. Those cute little menu buttons or that cool PhotoShop logo may look nifty once loaded, but why would a smut surfer wait around to see your artistic posturing? They don't care if your site features specially rendered 3D graphics that make it look like a spaceship. Not if it takes an Internet eternity to load.

The average adult surfer just wants to see your porn. They want you to show them where it is and where they can get more. Your graphic skills only matter when it comes to your content.

How can you optimize the graphics that adorn your adult web? The first way is to rid your page of superfluous artistry. The first place you should look is at your logo. A text logo is always preferable to a graphical one when it comes to both download time and search engine optimization. Many SE spiders use text to index a page and a site that repeats it's title below the head tag with text with be indexed more favorably.

If you can't part with your cool logo graphic, at least resize it so it loads faster and don't forget to add text to the logo image's "alt" tag.

The second place to review when ridding your page of unnecessary images is among the buttons, bows and cute animated graphics you thought were so delightful. That dancing envelope gif image attracts eyes no better than a color-coded text link.

Learn to add dimension and interest to your page with HTML text colors and table layouts. An HTML horizontal line tag in a complimentary color divides a page as easily and effectively as a graphical one. Decorate a page with colored characters suck as asterisks or ampersands. Not only will you save download time; you'll save bandwidth because text on a web page loads almost instantly and is far smaller in size than graphics.

The less your surfers have to download, the less it costs to host your page.

When you have looked at all the extra graphics on your site and have eradicated or resized aesthetic ones, then you can concentrate on optimizing the important graphics: Your Content.

There are many great programs that will resize, reformat or remove excess colors from all web graphics. To find out what they are and where you can purchase/download them, please visit the Library page on Cozy Academy. Look for the section entitled Software and click on the "Design / Imaging / Video" subsection.

Your adult website is like a song on the radio. Don't let unnecessary graphics make your surfers change the channel.