Q: Is there any way I can convert an internal CD writer for external use? Theyre a lot cheaper and I dont see why I shouldnt be able to use them.

A: External CD writers are more expensive than the internal ones because of the connections they use. An external drive will have a socket to plug a power adapter into and an easy to remove data cable.

Internal drives use the same data cables as your computers hard drive and also the same internal power cables. It is possible to buy cases to put hard drives in to use out side of a computer but not CD drives (plus they can cost about £40).

Q: People are complaining my web site is slow to load and I think it has something to do with the images. What sort of images should I be using and is there any way I can optimise them for web use?

A: Producing optimised images is easy if you follow the following guidelines:

Make the dimensions of the
image no larger than they need be.

Use a resolution no higher
than 72dpi as this is the maximum display resolution for monitors.

For saving photographs or
other images with lots of variation in colour and texture, use .jpg format. For other graphics use .png or .gif formats.

These formats compress the images without substantial loss of quality.

If saving an image as a .jpg
file, experiment with just how much compression to use before theres a significant degradation of quality. I often find an image can be compressed heavily before the difference becomes substantial.

All these changes can be made in a modern image processing application, such as Adobe Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro.

Optimising your images is not enough, however. Its just as annoying to download a page with 50 compressed images as one with just one big picture.

Try to split pages which are graphics-heavy wherever possible.

Q: How can I find out how many people are visiting my site? Is there something I can buy or can I do it myself?

A: Here are three ways. The first and the best is to ask your web site hosting provider to provide a site statistics facility. This is usually accessed as a web page full of statistics and graphs showing useful information for a given time period, such as:

how many visitors there were
how many web pages were
accessed how the visitors got to the site
(e.g. from a search engine like www.google.com)

Another way to do this is to use a facility such as www.hitslink.

com. Alternatively, you can see how many people have visited a given web page by placing a hits counter on the page. A number of free hit counters can be found at the www.tucows.com web site.

Malcolm McIlhagga is from Sigmer software. For more information go to www.sigmer.com