More Website Tips   Choose a Section: Selecting Photos Using Photos Using the Editor

You will most likely want to 'decorate' the editable text areas of your Web site with photos of your area. A picture really is worth a thousand words when showing your site visitors the look and feel of your community.  Photos provide color and catch the eye.

Tips for Using Photos

1. The photo format most commonly used on the Web is .jpg. If you have photos in other formats, you will need to convert them to .jpg in order to upload.
    
2. Photos should be attractive - green trees, grass, flowers (or a beautiful snow scene), nice blue sky, sun shining. Just use common sense. Avoid shots showing power lines, cars in driveways, general clutter.
    
3. Although you can set the dimensions of a photo AFTER uploading, it's much better to size the photo correctly before upload. The reasons:
   1. Photo files that are too big in file size will increase page load times and irritate your visitors.
   2. Setting the dimensions after upload does not change the photo file size.
   3. Setting the dimensions after upload leads to distortion - especially with bricks, clapboards, any kind of house siding.
   4. Photos that are too big in their dimensions will 'break' your site's design.
   5. Photos that are too big in their dimensions will cause a bottom slider bar to appear.
       
4. Photo dimensions (width an height) can be reduced and still preserve quality but they cannot be increased and still preserve quality.
    
5. You need a decent photo editor program so that you can crop, size correctly, and compress the photos you plan to upload to your site. If you don't have a photo editing program, you can download Google's free Picasa software - http://picasa.google.com/. We do not provide tech support for Picasa or any other photo editor.
    
6. Never upload photos directly from your digital camera. Those photos are way too big in both file size and dimension.
    
7. Size your photos appropriately for your design. Most of our designs are not fixed-width. However a few of them are sized for best viewing at 800 x 600 browser resolution. What you want to avoid is causing a bottom slider bar to appear at the currently most common browser resolution of 1024 x 768. A photo that is too large for the design will force a bottom slider bar.
    
8. Photo dimension examples:
   1. 300 x 200.
      
       
   2. 540 x 360
      
       
   3. 845 x 565 (original size) Notice how this size forces a bottom slider bar on this page at 1024 x 768 resolution.
      It does not fit with the design of this Web site!
      
       
   4. Redimensioning - the dimensions of the 845 x 565 photo above have been set to 540 x 360 in the html, not in a photo editor.
      Notice the distortion on the brick and the 'fuzzy' roofline. This is something you don't want to do!
      
       
   5. Photo Expansion - the photo below was expanded from the 300 x 200 size. Notice the significant loss of quality.
      

 

 

The basic bottom line: start with the large version of a photo (approximately 800 pixels wide for landscape style photos is a good rule of thumb). Resize and compress it in your photo editing program.