The effective use of graphical images can enliven webpages by breaking up the monotony of long blocks of grey text. Such graphics can be clip art originally designed for print use and repurposed for the web, photographs, artwork designed specifically for blogs and webpages, or graphics that you create yourself.
To incorporate graphics on your blog or webpage, you should know a little bit about the standard graphic formats. These include GIF (Graphical Interchange Format), JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) and PNG (Portable Network Graphics). these three formats have gained predominance on the web because their advantages and disadvantages balance out each other.
For example, the GIF format only supports 256 colors but it compresses nicely with no noise. This makes it ideal for images with broad, flat areas of color, such as cartoons and logos. The JPEG format is far more efficient than GIF for photographs and images with color gradiations and it provides varying levels of compression, but it can introduce noise, referred to as “artifacts,” into an image.
The PNG format could be seen as a compromise between the GIF and JPEG formats. It does a good job on cartoons and logos, but does not compress photographs as tightly as JPEG.
The Mac has a long and storied history in the field of graphic creation. The first Mac shipped with a groundbreaking painting application called MacPaint, and it has been the preferred machine of choice for many graphic designers ever since.
Today, certain graphics programs, such as Adobe Photoshop, dominate on the Mac, but there are other alternatives as well. For example, GraphicConverter is an excellent all-around image editor and manipulator. A search through the Mac App Store for “graphics” as of this writing brings up 726 matches, and includes applications for everything from logo design to animation.
File size is an important consideration in designing graphics for the web. While it is true that most web surfers have high-speed connections, this is counteracted buy the fact that webpages also tend to incorporate more graphic elements than they did in the past. Therefore, you should give a good deal of thought to using the graphics format that is best suited to your needs.
Another point to remember is that a graphic can be resized in software or can be resized on a webpage. In the latter case, even though the graphic may be displayed at a small size on the page, the full-size version still has to load before it can be displayed. If it takes too long, the site visitor may get tired of waiting. It is better to include a small size version of an image on the page itself, with the option to click it if the visitor wishes to load a larger version.
Some sites have repeating graphical elements such as logos or navigation buttons on each page or even on the same page, which can lend consistency to the site. The same element, no matter how many times it may be repeated on the site, can and should be represented by a single file. This file will then only need to be loaded onto the visitor’s computer once and it will be stored in his or her cache so that it can be used repeatedly throughout the page or site.
If you are looking for graphical images for your blog or website, there are a number of sites from which you can get free images. For example, Stock.XCHNG calls itself the leading FREE stock photo site. It boasts 350,000 quality stock photos by more than 30,000 photographers.
