Using images in your dynamic website - a few points to keep in mind

Used properly, website images will greatly enhance the appeal and functionality of your website.  Used poorly and they make your website slow or completely unusable.  Understanding the relationship between on-screen and actual size can be very helpful and play a critical role when optimizing the loading speed of your web pages.

We have all seen those websites that seem to work extremely slowly.  Quite often, the slowness can be explained when taking a closer look at the images used on the page.  What you see on the screen is not always to whole story. 

Web designers have the ability to manually or automatically resize how an image appears to the web visitor. But the ACTUAL IMAGE SIZE is more important to how the website functions. 

To get an idea of how big a web image REALLY is, consider the following examples

Actual Size:  606px X 792px
Mechanically resized to 200 X 261
Download Size:  502kb

Actual Size:  200px X 261px
Download Size:  7kb

Note that both images above actually APPEAR to be the same size but that is far from the truth in the world of web design.  If you RIGHT CLICK each image and VIEW PROPERTIES you will notice that the Dimensions are exactly the same.  But take a close look in the property inspector window of the number of BYTES.

FOR TACTICAL WEB SOLUTIONS CUSTOMERS
If you have a dynamic website with a content management system

1. In most situations, the website will take care of resizing the on screen image into pre-defined proportions.
2. You are resposible for following the upload size restrictions of the actual image.
3. A 17 inch monitor is about1200 pixels wide.
4. We recommend using images that are 500px wide or less.
5. Most digital camera images are way to big to work well with a website.
6. Many images should be resized before uploading.
7. Your control panel will have hints or instructions regarding size limits.
8. Failure to following size limitations may result in a Server 500 Error and prevent the image from uploading.

How to resize images and optimize for the web

A graphic design package is wonderful, but few people have access to something like Adobe Photoshop.  Never fear because we have a free solution that works great!

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