When you stick an image on a website it should just work right? Sometimes it doesn’t. Have you noticed that sometimes you add an image to a site and in the browser it is just not the right size, or takes way too long to download? Well, digital images have some hidden traits that should be taken into account when adding them to websites. In this blog post I will cover image dimensions, file types, how browsers handle images, and offer some online resources for getting your images under control.

Dimensions

When someone asks you to make an image file smaller, what exactly are they talking about? Files can be measured in many different ways and that can sometimes cause confusion when talking about image size. It’s important to understand all the different ways you can measure how ‘large’ a digital image is.

Image resolution

Digital images are like mosaics made of very tiny colored tiles called pixels. The smaller those tiles are, the more you can fit into a particular area. This pixel density is also known as image resolution. The ‘particular area’ that people use to measure image resolution is a square inch. When pixels get smaller, the more pixels you can smoosh into a square inch and therefore the higher the image resolution is. As you might imagine, when the pixels are smaller, the overall picture is sharper and is more detailed. Something that might not be so obvious is that image resolution is used not only for image files, but also computer monitors. The pixels on a computer monitor are clusters of tiny red, green, and blue lights. And while you can change the resolution of an image, you cannot change the density of tiny lights in your monitor. Typically monitor resolution is 72 tiny clusters of lights per inch. So while images meant to be printed need to have high pixel density to match traditional photography, images meant for screen need only be 72 pixels per inch (ppi).

Dimensions (width and height)

So since the pixel density of images on the screen is fixed at 72 ppi, measuring the width and height in inches doesn’t make very much sense; you would be constantly multiplying by 72. Instead, measurements on computer screens are done in pixels. Typically websites are 960 pixels wide, so images meant for websites are going to be less than that.

File ‘weight’

So while digital images can be measured in height and width, just like a physical picture, they have another aspect due to the fact that they are stored data. The amount of space needed to store the image is referred to as file size. Images tend to be larger than word files and PDFs, but not quite as large as sound or movie files. Each pixel takes up a certain amount of space, so it makes sense that the gross number of pixels has a direct effect on the total size of the file. For example a 1-inch square image at 72 ppi is far smaller than a 1-inch square image at 300 ppi. This is why images at print resolution are too ‘big’ for the screen. If you make sure that your images for the web are 72ppi and that they are the appropriate dimensions for the target location, the file size should take care of itself. You can check this yourself, however. Image files for the web should certainly never be more than 1MB.

Compression

Besides bringing the resolution of an image down to 72 ppi, there are other ways to make an image’s file size smaller. This is called ‘compression.’ Compression techniques usually look for wasted information and remove it from the file. The level of compression is sometimes a trade off for image quality. For instance, JPEG compression will make an image look blurrier and reduce the number of colors in the palette. Some image types have compression that is lossless and will only remove redundant data that does not affect image quality.

File Types

There is more than one way to turn a picture into a bunch of data. That process is called encoding and different methods for encoding have been devised by different groups with different purposes in mind.

JPEG

JPEG is a standard for encoding photographs devised by the Joint Photographic Experts Group. This is a very popular standard for photographic images but because of its method for compressing it is not ideal for graphic images like logos. Jpegs can have very large file sizes depending on resolution and the level of image compression.

GIF

Graphics Interchange Format is an older format used on the web. It has a limited color palette and so it is better used for logos, or other areas of flat color. GIFs can have transparent pixels, but they are fully transparent and cannot be partially transparent.

PNG

The Portable Network Graphics format was created to replace the patented GIF format. PNGs have a larger palette then GIF, but are still better suited to graphics than to photographic images. PNGs are also capable of many levels of transparency.

How Browsers Handle Images

Now that we’ve covered some of the aspects of images themselves, there are a few things you should know about how browsers handle digital images.

The image tag

The image tag is a line of code that tells the browser that it needs to fetch an image file and place it in the web page. The code will at the very least specify where the image file is located. It can also specify how big to display it, include a short description, and determine how the image should be aligned.

Resizing with attributes

“Specify how big the image is” you ask? No, not exactly. You are specifying the size that the web browser will display the image and does not actually do anything to the image file itself. While this can be used to force large images into small spaces, this is not recommended. The problem is that the browser will still download the whole image before displaying it and this causes the page to download slowly. Specifying an image’s display size is helpful however for a couple reasons. First, it allows the browser to leave the correct amount of space for the image so the layout doesn’t ‘jump’ once the image is loaded and second; specifying a width in percentage (100% for example) ensures an image will always be proportional to its container.

Free Resources to Resize Images

Okay, so you have this uncompressed image that is something like 3000 pixels wide because the photographer wanted to make sure it looked okay if it was printed. All those pixels mean this picture is 5 MB – far too large to upload to your site. What should you do? Here are some online tools to size your image for the web.

  • http://www.resizr.com/ – This site will let you set your images dimensions, rotate the image, and even convert it to a different image type.
  • http://www.webresizer.com – This site has a side-by-side comparison with your original image so you can see the result of your changes and tells you how big the resulting file will be.
  • http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/ – Smush it only compresses files. This is most effective for PNG and GIF formats.

Now go. Wrangle your Images.

Having a better understanding of digital images should now help you gain more control over your web site. It means that your users will not have to wait so long for the images on your site to load, that your layout will not break because the images are too wide, and that you can save server space by having more compact files.

Do you own a website, if yes then you might surely know about Search Engine Optimization? If you want to make your website successful, SEO optimized content and web design is most important aspect. SEO literally mean bringing more quality and quantity traffic to a website from search engines. Make sure that the content you are adding to your website is well optimized, so that the search engines like Yahoo, Bing and Google find it while crawling. It is the search engine where people go to search the required content. When we are doing the search engine optimization for your website, you are actually targeting different kinds of searches which include text based search, video search images search and industry specific searches.

Website traffic analysis, keyword research and content optimization are the three main criteria of SEO. When we talk about the content optimization, we are taking about the editing of web content, link building and HMTL coding. Good and well optimized content and good web development increases the chance of getting good place in search engine rankings. Keep on reading to know more about the SEO tips that you need to keep in mind if you want to see your website on top ranks.

1.Proper Use of Flash

People often use Flash to perk up the look of their website but the problem appears when it is not used properly. It is not recommended to use the Flash where it is not necessary. I never understand why people use Flash where HTML/CSS has to be used. However, Flash is a wonderful component to be used in a website if you want to add an audio, 3D animation or a video in your website. Flash cannot be used to power the entire site but is only served as a component of HTML/CSS site. Flash though is web accessible and SEO friendly but when we compare it to HTML, JavaScript and CSS it is a bit difficult.

2. Proper use of JavaScript

If you want to use content in your website with both hiding and showing flair you must use the JavaScript. This tact is not only used to attract the web robots and search engines but also loved by the screen readers. If you want to check whether JavaScript is hidden in the web page or not, you need to disable the JavaScript temporarily and then check if you can read the content or not. These settings can easily be changed from the browser settings.

3. File naming

If you want your images to be Search Engine Optimized make sure that you name the image files correctly. For example if you are uploading an image of pink flower, name it as pinkflower.jpg and not anything random like img3hia.jpg. Naming the file correctly gives an extra asset to your site. Keep the image name of ten words or less and use the similar key terms as used in the content.

4. Do not stuff your home page with links

Though the hyperlinks on the home page pointing to the other pages is important but make sure that there are not more than 150 links. Allowing too many internal links makes the page overcrowded and this may result in slow processing of the page.

5. Don’t Use Redundant Links

Linking any one page redundantly with some other particular page is not sensible at all. Search engines will count only the first link of the page and all other are sheer waste, it may in-fact confuse the readers.

6. Deep Linking

The links which point the internal pages instead of the home page are called deep links. Using the deep links is a fantastic way to send power to the website.

Guest Blogger:

Alicia, internet geek and a wildlife photographer. You will mostly find her capturing images in deep forests and she enjoy searching for temp staffing services, photography tips, design tips and free apps for her iPhone.


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