Archive for March, 2010

Unfortunately no one image file type is best for all Website needs. The Image type used for images on your Website is dependent on numerous factors of which the prime are; image quality requirements, the content of the image, the number of colours and any size limitations. In general the aim is to have the best quality at the smallest file size; quality is obviously important from the visitor and branding angle whereas size is critical from a load-time and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective. The three image filetypes which all newer browsers handle and which are best for Web image rendering are Portable Network Graphics (.png), Graphics Interchange Format (.gif) and Joint Photographic Experts Group (.jpg and .jpeg). Bitmap (.bmp) should never be used due to its large file sizes produced. This article is concerned with how to choose the best image format for images on your Website (There are numerous non-format factors which are important is attaining the best quality with the smallest filesize such as ensuring that the dimensions of the image are appropriate however these are not covered in this article).

Which Image File-Type to Use

PNG

PNG has excellent compression, a wide range of transparency and excellent interlacing. PNG was introduced as a replacement for GIF and supports more colours and greater compression among other advancements. PNG does not itself support animation as GIF does and can produce larger file sizes than GIF with limited colour images. PNG provides excellent quality for line art and text images conversely is seldom a better choice than JPG for photographs producing significantly larger filesizes.

GIF

GIF is well suited to blocks of solid colour, line art and text with limited colour and sharp edges. The GIF format was introduced prior to PNG and like PNG is not suitable for photographs. In most situations PNG is preferable to GIF due to the formers greater compression and PNG having a far greater range of usable colours. GIF however does produce smaller file sizes with comparable quality compared to PNG in some situations (such as solid blocks of colour) and is able to render small sized animations.

JPG / JPEG

JPG is best used for photographs and has become the most widely used format for digital photography. JPEG is good with smooth transition of colour such as paintings and photos however is not ideal for situations where multiple edits of the image is required (as JPG loses data every time it is edited). Web images are seldom edited multiple times therefore the lossy characteristics are unlikely to be a deciding factor for Web usage. JPG produces inferior quality images with a larger filesize for line art, text and images with sharp lines such as many logos (PNG and GIF are usually better for these images).

Examples

The examples below illustrate when it may be best to use a particular image format:

Line Art and Text

For line art and text, PNG and GIF will give a smaller filesize with better quality than JPG. The first two columns of the example show that occasionally PNG gives a smaller filesize than GIF and vice-versa.

Photographs

For photos it is almost always preferable to use JPG due to it’s superior photo quality rendering and better compression.

Summary

• For Photographs and highly detailed images use JPG.
• For text, logos and line-art use PNG or GIF.

All newer internet Browsers (Firefox, Safari, Opera, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer etc.) fully support all three image filetypes. As there is not speed or quality penalty for using multiple image filetypes on a Webpage it is recommended to use the image type most appropriate to give the best quality at the smallest file size.

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“Think simple” as my old master used to say – meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.
Frank Lloyd Wright

Why is it that so often people look for complex solutions to problems? One reason is that people tend to mistrust that a simple solution can actually resolve a complex (or simple) problem. Another reason is that people don’t know how to look (and therefore find) a simple solution. Every day all of us, I’m sure, can find situations where ‘things’ are being made far more complex than need be. Most often this complexity is unintentional however complexity can be a profitable game for some; say your PC has ‘crashed’ and you are desperate to get your data back, the solution may be as simple as the PC technician (or you) running a Windows repair disk which will take about an hour. The technician however may imply that significant complexity is involved in getting the PC working again which will result in over six hours labour. The five extra hours labour is a cost you as the consumer are willing to pay based on your understanding of the complexity involved in restoring your PC. Unethical practices such as deliberately adding complexity to defraud someone monetarily are a separate subject entirely and not covered in this article.

There are other situations where complexity is intentionally introduced in order to serve a personal purpose such as ‘survival’ or power-grabbing. This is often termed ‘politics’ within organizations and usually works against the good of the organization as a whole. Take this example; a person feels that their job will be at risk if they don’t have something to offer the organization that other employees don’t have. What the person then does is start to gossip about others who this person perceives as posing a risk to their job and starts to withhold information so as to become the single source of knowledge. Unfortunately most medium and large size organizations employ people like this and organizations often should do more to communicate that knowledge sharing and co-working is in the best interests of the organizations and the employees (and that purposefully negatively influencing the sharing of knowledge will not be tolerated).

As stated before, most complexity is introduced inadvertently. Been to a meeting where the answer seems so obvious and simple yet the meeting drags on for hours and no final solution is reached? Organizations must waste huge amounts of money every year through unnecessarily complex solutions. Here are four guidelines to assist in groups reaching more effective solutions more quickly (keeping in mind of course that simplicity should be sought in all activities and not only in formal group actions):

1. Embrace the Simple and Obvious:

If something is obvious then it is likely the best solution. For some reason people love to look for solutions that aren’t immediately obvious or are very convoluted; obvious solutions are usually the most simple and easiest to implement. Richard Dawkins summed this up well with ‘complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things’.

2. Speak the same language:

‘The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words’. Mary Anne Evans/George Eliot

Organizations often create their own language e.g. set of acronyms or terms used. It is essential that, when trying to find a solution, everyone is communicating effectively and understands the dialog. The language and words used should be as generic and non-technical as possible (i.e. simple) to afford the greatest chance of minimizing misunderstandings.

3. Check your foundation:

In troubleshooting situations it is easy to interweave multiple assumptions into the problem especially as time goes by and ideas are investigated. The problem then changes from the basic factual understanding of it. It is therefore necessary to get rid of assumptions especially where they may be inaccurate and return to the basic problem. As Ayn Rand noted ‘Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong’.

4. Understand and keep revisiting the Objective or Problem

Everyone in the group must have the same understanding of the problem that requires a solution or the objective. If the whole group doesn’t share a common perception of the problem or objective then how can the objective be reached or problem resolved? If the objective is to reduce staff absenteeism’ then all must understand this objective and it must be reiterated at various intervals (to realign the groups’ thoughts towards the objective).  As Peter Drucker noted about Management by Objectives; “Management by objective works – if you know the objectives. Ninety percent of the time you don’t.” (One person’s simple objective or goal is anothers extreme complexity however as is illustrated by Stephen Hawking’s goal: ‘My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all’.)

To sum it all up, in the words of Confucius, ‘life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated’. At the end of it all, the attitude should really be ‘everything is simple, what is important is finding the way to make things simple’

P.S. There are many theories dealing with complexity and simplicity including; KISS, Occam’s Razor, Worse is Better, Parsimony etc.

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Load speed of WebPages is increasingly becoming important, not only for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) but also because people are becoming ever more intolerant of slow Websites. As Internet network speeds have increased (ADSL, 3G, WiMax etc.) so content of Websites has increased therefore negating some of the benefits of faster networking.

The obvious question that many people on my SEO and Web related courses ask is how to improve Website Speed. There are two factors here; Website speed and Webpage speed. Both are interrelated but probably best described separately (recommendations include on-page and off-page factors and range between non-technical to fairly technical):

1. Improve Website Speed

Website performance includes factors that will influence the entire site and every affected Webpage. The obvious candidates for improvement are hosting your Website with a high availability provider, ensuring that your Website host has high-speed servers and so on. Some other factors to consider are:

1.1. Host in the same country as your primary target audience

Having your Website hosted close to your target audience can realize big benefits in Website speed. Website I have targeting the U.S.A. are hosted in the U.S. whereas this Website is hosted in Australia due to my primary audience being located in Australia. There are various good cloud hosts such as Amazon EC2 which simultaneously host and deliver from multiple geographic regions. Although often more costly, for busy Websites with multiple targeted countries Cloud hosting is likely beneficial.

1.2. Use Expires header.

Expires header instructs compatible browsers to store the file and use that local file for reuse instead of downloading the file from the Website. An expiry date and time is added according to settings in the .htaccess file and the file is only downloaded again if the expiry date and time has passed or if the browser is otherwise instructed to download all files again (e.g. ctrl + F5 in Firefox). Expires Header settings hugely benefit visitors that revisit your site.

Here is how to enable Expires Header for gif, png, jpg,jpeg, ico, css and javascript:

1. Copy the blue text below

# BEGIN Expires header

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresDefault A0

ExpiresByType image/jpg A1209600

ExpiresByType image/jpeg A1209600

ExpiresByType image/ico A1209600

ExpiresByType image/gif A1209600

ExpiresByType image/png A1209600

ExpiresByType text/css A1209600

ExpiresByType text/javascript A1209600

# END Expires header

2. Open the .htaccess file of your Website which will be in the same folder as index.php or index.htm or similar (open .htaccess with notepad, notepad++ or similar).

3. Paste the copied text into .htaccess at the next line after text already in .htaccess and save changes.

The A1209600 text as entered into .htaccess determines the time for the files to be stored by the browser. 1209600 is calculated as 60 seconds x 60 minutes x 24 hours x 14 days. If you don’t amend affected files often then I recommend increasing the time to, say, 31 days (of course, renaming files on your Webpage/Website will make browsers download the file).

1.3. Use caching

Server-side caching benefits include the minimising of code execution. For example, on almost all websites that include multiple pages and/or anything beyond just plain text multiple files are referenced in compiling the final Webpage. This means that every time a request is made to view a webpage, multiple files are run to produce the output which all results in execution time. One way of eliminating the need for the running of all the files every time a page is viewed is to use caching. Caching stores the files and/or output in a very easily and quickly accessible ‘dynamic’ memory/storage for a period of time. Although caching may not provide significant performance enhancements for Pages accessed infrequently, for busier sites, caching provides considerable speed benefits.

The ‘WP Super Cache’ WordPress plugin is popular in order to enable Website caching.

1.4. Minify

As described on the main minify page; ‘[minify] combines multiple CSS or Javascript files, removes unnecessary whitespace and comments, and serves them with gzip encoding and optimal client-side cache Read the rest of this entry »

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Students studying one of the Business Services Training Package (BSB07) certificate or diploma qualifications occasionally ask how useful the course will be towards attaining a place on a Master of Business Administration (MBA) program. Unfortunately there is no simple answer due to a number of factors:

Not All MBA Courses are Equal

Good MBA schools are expensive to attend and provide an excellent education. The majority of MBA schools however are of a poor quality and are quite simply a waste of time (i.e. job advancement after attaining an MBA won’t be forthcoming and the course content will be inadequate). When selecting a MBA school to attend it is always a good idea to attend one of the best. There are two means of discovering the worth of an MBA school; rankings and accreditation;

• Rankings: Ranking of MBA schools and programs is a contentious issue as the means of ranking and interpretation of data is sometimes questionable. The most respected rankings are those by the Financial Times, The Economist and Businessweek. Choose a school or program ranked in the in the top 50 to be guaranteed of a good MBA program.
• Accreditation: There are three major MBA accreditation bodies; EQUIS, AMBA and AACSB. Accreditation by any of these three guarantees a reasonable standard of education (a few Schools such as Henley Business School are accredited by all three).

What Defines Usefulness of a Certificate or Diploma?

Unfortunately a Certificate IV in Business, Diploma of International Business or any other Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) qualification from the Read the rest of this entry »

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Well done to Trend Micro for their latest Australian TV adverts. They are excellent (my favorite below):

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