Images can be a powerful and effective means of communication in web pages, but when using images on the web it is essential that your images are prepared properly before adding them to a page if they are indeed to be effective.

 

The image that you export from your digital camera or scanner is often very large - both in terms of dimensions (pixels or centimetres) and resolution (detail, complexity - usually expressed as dpu - dots per inch) You will often be able to see that a single image is 1 or 2MB in total file size and this will be as a result of either the dimension or the resolution being very large (or both) Simply putting an unprepared image into a web page without optimising it in any way will render your page inaccesibly to many viewers - particularly thos on a dial-up connection so it is important to pay attention to dimension, resolution and file size.

 

Most digital cameras come bundled with software for reducing and/or optimising images, and there are also a number of free and cheap options available (we used to use something called Adobe Phosothop Elements which is excellent for the task) basically you want to reduce your resolution to 72dpi - the standard for displaying images on the web -  and the either crop or reduce it's size to something appropriate. The image of a flower on the left here is 100 pixels wide by 150 pixels high, has had it's resolution reduced to 72dpi and has then been saved using a common function called 'Save for web..' in our software. Your software has probably got something similar.

 

Once you have optimised your images you can start to use them in this site. The page type we have created for you to display your images is called Image Gallery. More information about page types can be found here You can also insert a logo next to your main page listing by choosing a picture in Step One We recommend an image for a logo to be no larger than 50 pixels high, or 200 pixels wide when used for this purpose.