I've not yet come across anyone trying this, but there is a definite need for it, which you can easily confirm for your self.

Grab a copy of good old Yellow Pages and open it almost anywhere. Find a couple of display ads that include their web site address. As an aside, you might be surprised at how many business around your area don't appear to have web sites even now. There must be an opening for budding web site developers here.

Open your browser and have a look at some of these sites. Something that always gets my attention is the number of sites, some of them even nice, professional looking jobs, that have dismall photographs.

Aside from dodgy photography, lots of these are huge files that take for ever to download.

Optimisation

Clearly there are many folks out there who have no idea about how to optimise graphics for the web. Even if they manage to take a decent photograph to begin with, things seem to go pear shaped by the time they hit the web.

There are many free and low cost applications designed to produce highly optimised jpeg, gif and png images specifically for use on web sites so it's a bit of a mystery why this is still so prevalent.

Two Opportunities

The two openings to make some money here are:

• Taking new, high quality photographs and producing highly optimized web graphics
• Optimising the existing bloated graphics files

Whichever way you choose will depend upon the state of the existing images. If they are simply huge, bloated files you can easily grab them off the site, run them through your optimising software (details at the end) and e-mail them back to the owner or their web master.

If the graphics are poor quality you will need to either obtain the originals or take new ones. Obviously there is more work, and therefore more money in this route.

Making Contact

Contacting the owner and then making your sales pitch is where many budding entrepreneurs fall down. Many of us find it difficult to contact a total stranger, particularly in his environment which may be almost alien to us, and try to persuade him to give us money.

This project makes things much easier for us because the initial contact does not need to be face to face.

Simply grab a couple of the images off the site in question, work your magic on them, upload the before and after images onto your web site if you have one or the free web space that probably came with your ISP account and write a letter to the owner.

The Sales Letter

Writing a sales letter is again something many find daunting. In this case, do not think of it as a sales letter, think as if you were offering advice to someone.

Explain that you were looking at his web site, you don't have to say why, and that you noticed some of the graphics were taking a while to download. Suggest that highly optimised graphics that download quickly will make his site much more friendly to the users by greatly reducing their waiting time when browsing his site.

Give him the url of the page containing your examples and ask him to take look explaining that you hope he doesn't mind that you have taken one of his files and carried out a number of techniques to speed things up a little.

Now tell him that if the speed advantage was multiplied by the number of photographs on his site it would download x seconds quicker which would result in people spending more time on his site instead of baling out when it takes too long to appear. They would also get to see far more of his products instead of blank spaces where the larger images have failed to appear.

Then ask him to give you a call if he would like to discuss this further.

Many people will be intrigued by the comparison you offer and will take a look. If you have done your job well they can't fail to be impressed and the phone call should not be long in coming. Check your web stats to see if the sample page is getting hits.

Targetting the Letter

Sending a letter to the company in question without specifically targeting someone is unlikely to work. You need to find the right person. You need to find:

• Someone who understands the benefits you can bring to their marketing effort
• Someone with a degree of responsibilty within the company who can make things happen
• Someone with control of a budget he can justify spending on the web site, or you will struggle to get paid

In many family run businesses this will be the owner or a member of his family. People so closely involved in the business are usually interested in improving things.

The web site may contain enough information to work out who you need to reach, but if it doesn't, head for your local library. There are many directories that even the smallest libraries carry in their reference section that give quite accurate information on who does what within a business both locally and nationally.

The Optimising Software

As I mentioned earlier, there are many free and low cost methods available to produce optimised graphic files especially intended for use on a web site.

Most graphics packages like Paint Shop Pro, Fireworks or Photoshop have the necessary facilities built in so if you have one of these you have all the tools you need. If you don't, here are a few sugestions.

Paint Shop Pro

Paint Shop Pro is now part of the Corel empire of graphics software. I've been using this since version 4, it's now on v.10 and is definately one of the best, most cost effective and easy to use graphics packages available.

It contains very easy to use gif, jpg and png conversion tools along with colour reduction, resolution conversion and palette optimisation utilities. A fully working 30-day evaluation is available from the following link.

Corel Paint Shop Pro

Gif Optimizer

If your starting image is less than 200kb, there is a free on-line optimizer here:

Other On-line Optimisers

Click here for another free on-line optimiser, or here for a third. Try searching Google for "on line graphics optimizer" to find more.

The Gimp

The Gimp is a fully functioning graphics package originally developed for th Unix world. It is now available free of charge from the link below. As it came from Unix, the user interface will look a little quirky until you get used to it, but it is well worth putting up with this.

http://www.gimp.org/

More Options

Looking around the popular download sites like Tucows or CNet will provide many more free or low cost graphics applications, but I recommend trying the 30-day trial of Paint Shop Pro.

I should perhaps point out here that I have no affiliation with any of the above, other than that I use their products. They are simply suggestions, from which I do not profit.

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