Preparing images properly is an important aspect of your website. As the customer cannot actually handle the product, the quality of the image you use is crucial. You must ensure that the image you use does justice to your product. When you prepare product images, think about details that will be of interest to the customer. Some shop solutions will allow you to store 2 or more images with each product. This will enable you to provide the customer with different views of your products, perhaps a full view of the product and a close up focusing on the detail of the product.
Common File Types
There are three primary file formats for web graphics: GIF, JPEG and PNG. GIF files are often used for low colour images like black and white photos or simple diagrams and can be optimised to have very small file sizes. JPEG and PNG are well suited to images rich in colour like photographs.
Sourcing Images
You will need to get images for your website in a digital format; there are a number of sources you can investigate for this:
- Local film developers can digitally convert photographs;
- Digital cameras can take photographs and import them directly into your PC;
- Scanners can be used for photos and brochures and often come with good image editing software;
- Suppliers often supply digital product images to help you build a website;Clip art can be found in Microsoft software and websites like Arttoday, Creativepro and Mediabuilder. CD-ROMs of images are also available;
- The web is a great source of digital images; Google and Altavista are good places to start searching. Most images will be copyrighted so get permission before you use them.
If you do need to photograph images, and are determined to do it yourself, you may find a light tent (http://www.ezcube.com/) helps. Alternatively engage the services of a professional photographer. Although this is an added expense, it'll greatly improve the presentation of your products.
Optimising Images for the Web
Once you have sourced your images and converted them in to a digital format you will need to optimise them. Few customers will wait for large graphics to download onto a page so you will need to reduce the image file size by optimising it with image editing software. Adobe Photoshop is the professional choice with price tag to match, but there are cheaper alternatives like Corel Paint Shop Pro, Filestream's Image Broadway or the free Open Source GIMP.
If you right-click on a web image and select ‘properties’ you can see its file size. A 10,000kb will take ten times longer to download than a 1,000kb image. To reduce the file size you can do the following things in your image editing software:
- Photos normally have a resolution of 300 dpi but a screen only has a resolution of 72 dpi. Reducing the dpi will greatly reduce the image file size;
- Remove unnecessary parts of the image by cropping edges and white borders. A smaller image has a smaller file size;
- Even with after cropping the image may still be quite large dimensionally. You can proportionally resize the entire image to reduce its dimensions and thus its file size.
- Finally you can export the image as a gif, jpg or png file as these formats all compress the file further to help fully optimise the image for the web.