CSS Sprites and Why You Should Be Using Them
In website design, there are several tricks of the trade that can help you do things better, more quickly and more efficiently. One popular technique today is using CSS sprites instead of a collection of smaller individual images to help improve the performance of the site and also to keep things more organized. If you’re not familiar with the technique yet, let’s learn a little more about sprites. And if you’re already using them, let’s look at some tools to help you do it more easily.
First, “sprites” are like video game sprites or the retro console games you remember as a kid. In fact, many browser-based games today are using sprites. In CSS, sprites do pretty much the same role as the sprites used in gaming. It’s one large file that contains multiple images for your website. This allows you to reduce loading time and also save on web storage space. Your website will load faster for the viewer when you are using sprites instead of many individual images to get the same effect.
How does it work?
The idea behind using sprites is that the server will only have to send one image file with all your images instead of a group of individual ones. With CSS, you are choosing how you want to display the images and you can choose any segment of those files as a background to any other element. You’re basically coding the message to the servers of what to display and how.
Combining all of your images into a single file will decrease the total file size of the images and it will also lower the number of HTTP requests for your site. The site will load quicker for human readers and it will also be more optimized for the search engines, improving your ranking.
How do you do it?
Now if you like the idea of CSS sprites but you don’t know how to do it, there are many tools available to help. First, you need to determine if you’re going to do it before you build the site or if you want to put your images in a sprite sheet and build them as you build the rest of the site. You will then have to update the CSS as you go along.
The alternative option is to create all of your images separately which can make editing and working on them easier. Once they are all prepared and your site is built, you can then add the sprites to the site where they need to be. Which method you use is really a matter of personal preference but many web designers who are new to using sprites find the latter method to be easiest.
But wait! What if you cannot write the CSS? The good news is that there are sprite-generation applications that help you do this and they will even produce the CSS for you and you just copy it over.
Planning for success
Once you decide to use sprites in your web design, it’s important to keep it organized. This is true for anything in web design. You probably already know that the more organized you are, the easier your project will be, especially if you ever have to come back and do edits and changes later.
Measure, plan and label everything accordingly. Your labels should also be clear and concise and possible for anyone to understand. If you use your own “designer code” for naming things, you’re going to run into problems if anyone else is working on the project and doesn’t know what your labels mean.
Tools for CSS Sprites
If you want to explore some tools to help you build CSS sprites and learn more about how they work, check out the following free tools:
- Compass- http://compass-style.org/
- SpriteMe- http://spriteme.org/
- Lemonade- http://www.hagenburger.net/BLOG/Lemonade-CSS-Sprites-for-Sass-Compass.html
Do you already have experience working with CSS sprites? What tips do you have for other designers using this technique to improve their web site designs and
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