The importance of images can not be overstated. They are almost as important as video! To get attention and keep someone on your website you need images.
What some people do not understand is that the images themselves have to be carefully chosen not just for the way they look (are they relevant) but also for the quality, size and shape.
This last point is where having a good company building your site is so important. Kehorne can advise on what type of image will work best for your site. Many sites now have a horizontal postbox size image that may be part of a collection of similar images that scroll and change on the page. These images can be very problematical because they have to be formatted to a particular size – and this size can change depending upon the screen size that is being used to view the site.
So looking for images that are landscape can be the first point, although good cropping can mean most images are possible it just means what you want my not end up being in the image at all!
Image size and formatting is also critical to the load time of the site. What many people are unaware of is that when a picture is taken it is usually a massive file size (in data terms) and most of this is unnecessary because it will only every be shown on a screen which has a limited number of colours, limited size and definition. So in the formatting process we can strip out details that will not make any difference to the image on a screen but will reduce the file size dramatically. Below are 3 examples of a picture with the last one being so close to the original but optimised for a website, obviously these could be bigger but the principal is the same.
Square image
Formatted into Landscape (file size 1.21MB – that’s BIG and would load very slowly)
Formatted into Landscape (file size 24KB – much smaller and faster to load)
If you need Kehorne to help with your images on your website to increase web loading speed just give us a call.
01753 526192 or email [email protected]
