Bwahahaa… oh man, yer killing me… Fireworks… Optimize… same sentence… :eyebrow: :headbang: :-/
Do you know any others that are better? I haven’t done it in a while, but there for a while I was trying every program I could find, and Fireworks let me create the smallest with the same visual quality (PNG8 ftw).
If you know a better one, I’d love to use it. I’m obsessed with the smallest possible images without sacrificing visual quality.
My choice for “better” – Corel Paint Shop Pro – X3 is ‘ok’, though I actually prefer the ancient PSP7 (back when it was made by JASC). It has probably one of the best save-time image optimizers I’ve ever dealt with.
I’ve not dealt with Fireworks since CS3 (since I refuse to now even INSTALL it due to adobe hijacking the hardware and trashing the OS in the process – how the devil do people put up with that?!? Oh wait, people also install Symantec/Nortons/McAfee…) but I can’t imagine Adobe even bothering to make improvements since it seems like every version just doubles the memory requirements while adding nothing useful.
Who knows, maybe they finally made it a moving target? Do you have an example in original 24 bit, and fireworks ‘attempt’ at optimizing? A common ‘original’ for comparison would be a great way of seeing who’s doing better.
There actually are better than PSP in terms of sizes, but they are usually standalone utilities.
Though hey, I’d still be using Aldus Photostyler if it supported long filenames… Gotta love adobe… can’t compete, buy out the competition then either rebrand the product killing off your own (flash vs. SVG much? Partition magic? PageMaker?) or just kill off the competition once you own it. (Photostyler).
Part of why I love the SVG guys touting it as a flash alternative, when the 1990’s champion of SVG abandoned it (adobe kicked SVG to the curb like a illegitimate child in a manure tornado) in favor or Macromedia’s product because SVG SUCKS. (one look at the size of a SVG font file is proof enough of that!)
In any case, usually I get a fireworks built .png, I can cut 50% off it using PSP – even 8 bit. It’s like their encoder isn’t doing the hspace algorythm or something – but there are so many optional encoding tests before compressing and encoding methods that are flat out skipped over in many implementations for saving… I remember that back on Photostyler or even Pixel – or the Vampire graphics library for FPC (Which I THINK pixel uses!) – where each of them with the same ‘settings’ and even the same PALETTE result in different file sizes.
Off Topic:
When I get some time I’ll put together a test and we can examine this in another thread. =)
Off Topic:
I’d be interested in that! I’ve been looking for a better way to optimize my images for quite some time now.
I don’t use anything but Wordpress anymore. Probably because I’m a control freak and don’t want to depend on a programmer to get things done on time and to respond. Of course, it does help if you have a lot of money to pay someone to customize your network…that was turned out to be a great investment though…saved me a lot of money.
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Hello again,
As I mentioned at the start of this thread I had been using Serif’s web plus and I posted a link to a site I had created. Prior to using Serif I had been using Xara’s WebDesigner. Would someone be willing to take a peek at the code and see how this one compares to the Serif code?
The site is simply one of the templates which I have uploaded. I just wondered how bad or good it is compared to Serif which I replaced it with.
Don’t worry, I have now ditched them both and have bought a copy of “build your website the right way using HTML and CSS” by Ian Lloyd. I am using Notepad++ which I like and am enjoying learning how to do this stuff properly. Another benefit I have found with hand coding is that I can now fiddle with my code using my phone, iPod, Jornada PDA or old Palm while away from my computer.
Thanks again to you all for the good advice I received.
It’s almost as bad. =p
It doesn’t have the million extra divs like the other one, which is good. It does however have all the other problems that the previous one had (inline styles and absolutely positioned everything).
Unless you’re writing mark-up for an email template, best to keep the inlines out.
You’ll know the time when you feel all the edit/uploads getting in the way. 
Not knowing what serif’s output for this would look like, hard to compare, but – if you want a flat analysis of the page, from the Top:
Tranny doctype, so it’s really HTML 3.2 and outdated. Tranny says you are in transition from 1997 to 1998 – and is not for building new websites.
Some odd “XAR files” meta – whatever the {expletive omitted} that is… Oh wait, I know what that is! POINTLESS BLOAT not one single user agent is actually going to use!
Windows-1252 character encoding… Not only fails to be supported across OS platforms, it begs the question “what is this, 1996?”
Multiple stylesheets with no media attributes and IE conditionals – the entire page building method is probably flawed.
Static style inlined in the markup – defeats the point of even HAVING external stylesheets or writing code after 1998.
Endless DIV and SPAN with ZERO semantic markup screen readers will have fun reading out the entire page as one giant run-on as if there were no punctuation present if you know what I mean by that further compounded by all the images for text with no images off fallback or text preset and even more inlined style for absolutely nothing especially with it all slapped together as a giant run-on of redundant values. 
Presentational images in the markup, which is REALLY painfully evident if you view the page with CSS disabled.
Nothing like 10k of markup when you don’t even have 1k of actual content on the page. It’s a laundry list of “how not to EVER build a website” and just more proof that wysiwygs and auto-slicing tools are the biggest road to failure there is out there.
Much less the “lets draw a pretty picture first” idiocy the PSD Jockeys seem to think has ANYTHING to do with web design.
Don’t even want to THINK what that’s going to cost to host or what a pain it would be to maintain once actual content and multiple pages are present.