PHOTOS/GRAPHICS FOR YOUR SITE

In order to get graphics to behave themselves on the web, we first have to compress them to take up as little room as possible, so that it takes as little time as possible for the viewer to download them.

Opinions vary, but most people believe that above 50K is getting too big, particularly if you combine several images on a page. In all cases, you may want to modify the images, such as to adjust the brightness or contrast, to crop them, or to scale them. Scanners and digital cameras usually come bundled with software to help you do these modifications.

Remember, most images will end up just a few inches square, at most, on the computer screen on your web site: that is just 300 by 300 pixels, at about 72 dots per inch (DPI).

Having a 1280 by 1280 image from an expensive digital camera will be of little benefit over the 640 by 480 image of an inexpensive one. Except in special cases showing particular products, you need to scale all of the images down before getting them to us. For the best graphics for your site, we suggest that digital photos be taken at a low resolution like 640 x 480.

Images you scan should be scanned at a lower resolution such as 100 dpi. We would like for you to provide your graphics for your site in .gif or .jpg formats. You may email them to us or provide them to us in disk form. We will be happy to scan, crop, manipulate or further edit photos for you at an additional charge.