What is an image? Technically speaking – an image is a digital visual aid. It is also referred to as a ‘graphic’ (custom image created with text / photos) or a ‘photo’ (digital picture). Images are absolutely necessary when building a website, crafting an email or handling social media accounts for your business. They can be used to successfully and visually describe the accompanying text content. That said – there is important information you need to know for using images effectively online.
As a bonus… I’m also offering a free guide – to help you size images correctly.
Image DO’s and DON’Ts
DO use personal photos moderately – where appropriate.
DON’T forget to purchase stock photos for some professional and high quality imagery. A website with only personal photos in use looks very amateurish – unless you are a professional photographer with a great image library.
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DO buy stock photos from reputable websites and read the license they provide for commercial use.
DON’T use images you found on Google or anywhere else! This is illegal and you can be liable for thousands of dollars in fees.
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DO follow best practices to increase your websites SEO ranking by using images that are properly named with alt tag usage.
DON’T forget to rename the image file. Most stock photo sites use random characters in the file names and that does absolutely nothing for your website’s SEO.
Image Size vs File Size
Have you ever been asked to provide a larger image? Well… What does that mean exactly?
Image size is the dimension measure in pixels – width x height. Knowing the right size image to use is is critical to your email or website looking its best. This is also not the same as the file size.
File size is measured in KB (kilobytes), MB (megabytes) or GB (gigabytes) and is not critically important to the image size. Although, it is related… Larger image sizes are going to have a larger file size and smaller image sizes will have smaller file sizes.
Image Sizes – A Visual
The most common issue I see in websites or emails that are created by well meaning DIY (do it yourself) clients is trouble with image sizes. There are two distinct ways to get the image sizes all wrong for your website.
1 – Using small images in a large space. They look extremely blurry.
2 – Using large images in a small space. The image will take a very long time to display and slow page load time.
Below is an example of the same image in 3 different sizes…
Image Size: 800 x 534 px
Image Size: 600 x 400 px
Image Size: 300 x 200 px
Side note… Yes, I am a huge animal lover. 🙂
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Theresa Kibler began studying programming in 1999, has a Bachelor of Science degree in Information Technology specializing in Web Application Development and an Associate in Science degree in Computer Programming & Analysis.
