Pictures are not required in a school website but they are highly recommended. You want to encourage residents to visit your website and, believe it or not, including pictures of staff and important events does that.
However, too many pictures or pictures that are too large slows down the site driving visitors away. Here are some tips for using pictures to your advantage.
Image Processing Software:
The first thing you will need is a program that allows you to manipulate, change, scale, and save graphic files in Web-friendly formats. Programs like Adobe Photoshop Elements®, iPhoto® or Microsoft® Paint are examples. Often, the software that comes with your camera will allow you to change the size or scale of your photos.
Capturing Images:
The next thing you will need is a way to capture the images themselves. A digital camera and/or a scanner are good investments if you plan on working with digital images. If you do not have a digital camera, you can always have photographs scanned and digitized at a local "Copy Shop." Either way, take lots of pictures if you can. The more you have to choose from, the better your final product will be.
Formatting Images:
This may sound obvious, but when formatting images for the Web it is important to remember that the web is not print. Images formatted for print media are too large and at to high a resolution to work online.
For example, a school logo measuring 2" X 2" on letterhead at 1200dpi (standard print resolution) pasted directly to the web would measure 33" X 33" at 72dpi (standard screen resolution) and would take several hours to download on a modem. This would be bad.
Although there are a number of graphics formats viewable on the Web, we recommend using either Portable Network Graphics (.png) or JPEG (.jpg) formats.
File Size:
The larger the file size, the longer the image takes to load. If at all possible, we recommend not letting an individual image exceed 35K, unless the size is important. This is a maximum range, as you will find that most reasonably sized images fall in the 20K range.
Maximum Viewable Size:
We recommend that no image be larger than 600 pixels in width. Aside from the fact that an image larger than that would also have an enormous file size, pictures larger than 600 pixels wide will start to negatively affect the way your pages look.
The 300 Pixel Rule:
The 300 Pixel Rule is a standard that we have enacted based on view ability, file size, and how an image fits in with the rest of a page. On certain forms, such as Slideshow form, images in the Picture (URL) Name field are set at 300 pixels wide. This does NOT affect pictures pasted into the message body of any form, document, or Email. It ONLY affects pictures called from that field on these specific forms.
What this means, is when you are formatting an image for a slide show form or department home page form (in the green box ONLY... you can paste images of any size into the message body), you need to make your image 300 pixels wide.
Helpful Hint: For images that are smaller than 300 pixels wide, you should not scale them up. As you might have noticed, the quality goes downhill fast. All you need to do is to increase the "Canvas" size rather than the "Image" size. The language that I've just used is specific to Photoshop, however. Read the manuals that come with your image processing software to find the appropriate action for you.
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