Whatever design you chose for your website, the chances are that you’ll want to include images for one sort or another. Whether it’s just a simple logo, or loads of photographs, you’ll need to edit your images to make them suitable for web usage. Images taken straight from digital camera can be several megabytes in size, as well as large in physical size. While it’s possible to alter the physical size on the fly using HTML, this practice is severely frowned upon. Images that are reduced on the fly can take minutes to download rather than seconds. Users are prone to getting bored and will likely leave your site if pages take too long to download, no matter how interesting the rest of your content is.

A far better method is to reduce the images in size before integrating them into your site. Trust me, your users will thank you if you do, especially if they are still using a dial up service.

• Photoshop - Commercial
  http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/family/

• Paintshop - Commercial
  http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Product/1184951547051#tabvi...

• Irfanview - Free - Windows only
  http://www.irfanview.com/main_download_engl.htm

• GIMP - Free
  http://www.gimp.org/downloads/