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    Best Practice Guide Web Images

  • hello@pixelsource.co.uk
  • October 20, 2016
  • Website Design
  • 0 Comments

    We all know that images are important, in fact, very important indeed, to the point of getting into a discussion on semiotics.

    So, the point of this post is to give you a good steer on what is cool and what is so not cool but like fashion this could change!

    What is a cool image to use on a website?

    There are no real rules on what is cool, maybe a photo of a pile of bank notes on a financial advisor website may appear acceptable, it wouldn't be so great on a website that sells shoes, it may well be sending out an incorrect message if you catch our drift.

    You need to look at the purpose of the image, when choosing an image it should be ticking these boxes:

    • Is it going to arouse some level of curiosity?
    • Is it relevent to my product(s) or service(s)?
    • Does the image quality represent my product or service?
    • Does your image say a thousand words (doesn't have to be exatly a thousand)

    Make sure you have the legal right to use an image!

    There is a general conception that if it is on Google you can go ahead and use this image (This is not cool), we spoke about this before over here "Using Images On Your Website"

    Taking or commisioning photos is the way forward for images to be used on your own website and we would urge you to go down this path. You can also use stock photographs of course, there are a number of stock photo websites where you can pay a small fee to use a photo for your website and/or digital communications.

    Getting technical with photos...

    Let's assume you have managed to get a great photo of your sales force and want to upload that photo to your website, the first thing you want to do is make sure you resize that image to something a little more suitable, most modern cameras and smartphones take great photos, the reasons they are great is because they shoot at incredibly high resolution so you are going to be wanting to resize that image for the web before using it.

    If you can imagine, the biggest browser (monitor) that will render your website and new photo will be probably about 1920px wide and it is likely your photo will be 5,6,7 times bigger than that, the file size maybe anywhere upto 50mb in size, this is not cool, if you were to upload a photo for your website that is that big you will find users will get a little hacked off waiting for your image to load and search engines like Google will mark you down because you have a slow page load speed which is a ranking factor, there are plenty of free websites where you can upload your photo and "save for web" that will do this for you, in fact, you may already have a bit of software on your computer that will do this - This will resize and crunch your image down to something more suitable to upload.

    We hope this have given you a good steer on how to use web images, for more information about using photos on your website you can speak to Pixelsource on 0191 4234251, reach out to us on Twitter @HelloPSource or email us via our contact form.

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