About Images

Most of you will want to add at least an image or two to enhance your Web page. Images can cause your page to load more slowly, so you should take special care to choose them carefully so that they enhance and explain your textual information rather than just adding special effects to your page, and are ideally formatted and created for use on the Web.

Images used on the Web must be in “.jpg,” “.gif,” or “.png” format (This tutorial will focus on the gif and jpg formats). Each of the two graphics formats has its own special use—.gif formats are used with line art, images with large blocks of the same color, and black and white non-blended images; .jpg formats are used for four-color photographic images or those images with shades of gradient (such as a black and white or sepia photograph). Both formats compress your image into a smaller size, but it’s important to use the one best suited for the image type. Because of the way the compression occurs, using the .gif compression, for example, to compress a photograph will actually INCREASE, rather than decrease, the file size.

The toughest part of using graphics is deciding exactly what type of image you want to include in your page.

The more time you spend with pencil and paper in designing the look and feel of your home page, the faster and more accurate the actual creation/finding of your graphic images will be. You should read through your text and decide where you would like to place images AND WHY. Just because you CAN use images in your home pages, doesn’t mean that you necessarily SHOULD. Make sure that images enhance and supplement your text and are not just there because it’s possible.