Always Save Your Fireworks Working File

You should always get in the habit of saving your working file when creating graphics. Your working file is Fireworks native format (PNG) and can easily be modified at any time in the future.

Say you create an image that includes text and a date that you want to incorporate into your Web site. Next year at the same time you want to include this same image but with the current year included on the date. If you did not save your working file (PNG) you would need to re-create the image from scratch, or somehow paint out the old date and include the new date. However, if you saved your working file you would simply need to open up the working file, change the date with the text tool and save out a new file to put on the Web (most likely a JPG or GIF file).

Optimize and Export to put on the Web

By optimizing your images to put on the Web you can ensure to obtain the best quality and smallest file size possible. Why is this necessary? If you do not optimize your files for the Web any student, user, client etc. that is on a slow internet connection will be sitting around waiting for your images to download. Most likely they will not wait until everything is downloaded and will simply look elseware for the content where they do not need to wait for a slow download of information.

With the Optimize panel you can choose what type of image would be best to export your file with and what settings to use an export options: JPEG, GIF etc.

Fireworks also provides you with a 2-up and 4-up preview window where you can choose various options to export your image to compare quality vs. file size.