Build Your Own Web Site: Creating Your Own Images and Illustrations
If you're selling products on your Web site you're probably going to need photos of them. Most people don't like to buy something sight unseen. If you're distributing products for a manufacturer, the manufacturer may be able to send you prints, electronic files, or they may just direct you to their Web site to download the files yourself. If you are selling your own home-made Widgets and Widget accessories, however, you're going to need to get photos of those items in a format you can put on your Web site.
[INSIDER TIP 1: Use .JPG format for photos and .GIF format for illustrations or line art.]
You have three of options for getting digital images of your products, you, your cat, or whatever you want on the site. You can either buy a good digital camera (no, don't try to use the digital web-cam that you got free from your ISP to use for video chats on the web), or you can take photos with your regular camera and scan the prints using a flatbed scanner. You can get a decent scanner for less than $200 and most come with some kind of image editing software. Good digital cameras are still pretty expensive -- more like $400 and up. They do save time, however, and the image quality has improved substantially. Your third option is to use your traditional film camera and send them to a processor who will also give you digital copies on either diskette or CD. (If there is a chance that you will also want to use the photos in print for your brochures then ask for higher resolution images on CD. The files you get on a diskette or download from a photo Web site probably won't be high enough resolution for print.)
[INSIDER TIP 2: Scan images for the Web at 72 dots per inch (dpi). That is the resolution of most monitors, and higher resolution scans will make no difference in the appearance of the image on screen. If you plan on using the image in print, however, scan at 200-300 dpi or higher depending on the printer or output device.]
Remember, graphics files are usually pretty big files. In order to have them on your site without making your site a big bloated elephant, you'll need to make sure you optimize your graphics before you load them. (Some canned clip art may already be optimized.) Optimizing removes some of the unnecessary pixels and colors and makes the graphic file smaller. You may give up a little bit of the quality but there is usually a good middle ground where the graphic still looks good but its file size is significantly smaller. Some programs will show you a few variations and let you choose the version that you like. Many programs also show you the estimated download time at different connection speeds. NetMechanic offers GifBot a free service/tool that will optimize your graphics for use on your Web site.
Another thing to remember is to size and crop your images or clip art in your illustration program before you put them on your Web page. A lot of WYSIWYG Web authoring software will let you resize or crop images within the program, but the image size as far as kilobytes remains the same. In other words, all of the image data is still there you just can't see it. This means the graphic file is larger than it needs to be. Crop out any unnecessary information before you place the image on the Web page.
[INSIDER TIP 3: You don't want your total page size to be larger than about 50k. That's not very big, but your visitors will thank you for it.]
