JBCR Virtual Solutions Blog

One process many clients don’t under­stand is ‘slic­ing and dic­ing’. When we first cre­ate a client’s unique web tem­plate, the ban­ner, side menu, etc., this is done as an image. In most cases it is not pos­si­ble just to stick up and ban­ner and have a back­ground color with a light inner table, except with cer­tain sales pages or ezine tem­plates, for example.

Why Slice and Dice to Cre­ate a Website?

The short­est and sim­plest answer is the smaller the file size of the images used in a web page, the faster the page will dis­play. This in itself is a good enough reason.

Web­site vis­i­tors tra­di­tion­ally have a very short patience span. Broadband’s steady pro­lif­er­a­tion has not changed this. If any­thing, vis­i­tor expec­ta­tions is now that pages should load instan­ta­neously. At rate, the longer they have to wait for a page to dis­play, the more likely it is you will lose them before they have viewed your offerings.

So how does slic­ing and dic­ing pro­duce faster page display?

Have you ever seen a page with cen­tral table with shad­ows to make the table appear as if it were float­ing on a layer above the page? Here is an exam­ple using a site we devel­oped: http://www.iaccweb.org/ . The left and right edges of the cen­tral table are tiny tiled ver­ti­cally to pro­duce the effect of a solid graphic. The slice is a very small file size, so takes much less time to dis­play than if we had used a side graphic big enough to fill the required area. This brings up another rea­son — why we slice and dice images.

Read more of this arti­cle here: http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html#Dice

Jan