A 'BAD' PICTURE IS WORSE THAN A THOUSAND WORDS!

By Jennifer Johnson

Be very careful about the images you choose to include on your
site. A high quality image can enhance your page, while a low
quality one can lower visitors' overall perception of the
quality of your site.

Images, especially large ones, cause pages to download slowly.
While it's important that you use an image of good quality, you
don't want to use one that will cause your page to have a
download time that can be measured with a calendar. What can be
done to reach a compromise between download time and aesthetics?

Let me start out by saying that I am by no means an expert in
this area, but I can give you a few of the tips I've learned and
used along the way when designing my sites. That being said,
there are a couple of factors that come into play when preparing
images for the Web; all considering that you have a good photo
to begin with.

If you don't scan your own photos, you might want to skip this
section. If you do scan your own photos, your first
consideration should be what resolution you'll scan at. I'm
going use scanning a 3"x5" photo on my scanner as an example:

For the same photo, this is the storage space required at the
following resolutions:

100 dpi 672.26 KB
300 dpi 6050.34 KB
600 dpi 24201.38 KB

As you can see, there is a significant difference.

You might then say, "Why don't you just scan everything at 100
dpi"? Well, the simple answer is this: most images would look
like you-know-what if you did that. I usually scan my photos at
300 dpi.

After you've scanned your images, you'll need to "tweak" them in
order to reduce the file size. There are a variety of ways you
can do this. You can reduce the actual image dimensions (HEIGHT
& WIDTH), you can reduce the color depth, etc. What you
definitely want to do without exception, though, is to use a
program that will optimize the images. You can access this type
of service free of charge online at NetMechanic's site using
GifBot. It's very simple to use and basically all you have to do
is select from the images you are given based on which gives you
the best quality at the least "weight".

One of the little tricks I've learned based on my own experience
is that some photos look just fine saved as GIF images as
opposed to JPEG images, which is basically the format of choice
for photos. If your image has large areas of basically one
color, I've found that saving in JPEG can create some very ugly
areas on the image due to compression. Sometimes, though, saving
in GIF may result in a larger file size, so you'll have to make
a call there.

Rate My Site(TM)
Find Out What People *Really* Think About Your Site
http://www.promotingyoursite.com Find out what works and what
doesn't on your site AND how to improve it.Free site review!
To subscribe, send any email to:
mailto:ratemysite-subscribe@listbot.com