Optimize your images

Size matters, but in the web business smaller is better. Of course for jpeg and png images you can increase the compression level right away in your graphic design tool.

But there are tools that can help you reduce the size of files, like pngcrush for PNG images. Gif images can be optimized too, even animated gifs, by reducing the amount of colors in the image color palette that is used and eventually remove non used colors from it.

For jpeg images there are tools that remove useless exiff data and therefore reduce the weight of the image without loosing any quality. Some tools like webresizer let you compare the optimized and the non optimized image side by side, so that you can compare if the optimization is worth it while producing a similar image without a too heavy quality loss.

There is also a really great online tool from Yahoo, called smushIt you should try out if you haven't already. Unfortunately smushIt has no Api yet you could use in your deployment script(s). But if you want to build your own smushit like images optimization tool, take a look at smushit's FAQ where they list the tools they use.