When you use any of the following types of graphical objects in your Fusion pages, Fusion must modify them and re-save them when you publish:
- Banners
- NavBar Buttons
- Inline graphics with the "stretch" property or "text in object" enabled.
When you publish, here's what Fusion does:
- Opens the Banner and NavBar Button images you set up in Style View,
- Adds the "custom text" you specify to the image,
- In the case of Inline graphics, regenerate them to a new size or with added text
- Saves each button and banner with a unique filename name associated with each page in your site, and
- Generates HTML code to display those images with link tabs where required.
Unfortunately, the graphic files Fusion generates are considerable larger in file size than the source image. This adds significantly to the "weight" of Fusion-built web pages.
With the new Nav Bar features in Fusion 7 (child pages or Javascript sub menus), this becomes an even larger issue. Without optimizing all those buttons, you will be significantly slowing your page load times for your site users.
How to Work Around this Problem:
Manually re-optimizing Fusion's autogenerated graphics frequently reduces their size by 40-50%. Several products let you do the following:
- Publish locally
- Batch-optimize the buttons and banners
- Manully upload the files to the server.
This process is greatly simplified if you publish "by flat" or "by asset type."
Ulead Smartsaver Pro (available in the gotFusion Store) does a great job of batch-optimizing Fusion's autogenerated graphic files.
Fireworks MX has a a couple of slick features for handling GIF files:
- Remove unused colours, and
- Snap to web-safe colours
This preserves the quality of the image while reducing the file size. Ulead Smartsaver takes a somewhat less elegant approach, setting all the graphics in the batch to the same number of colours and the same colour pallette.
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