Photography
Using good quality images on web pages is very important, particularly if the images are of products you are selling. We always recommend taking your own images of your products and make them the best quality you can. The manufacturer of your products may have good quality images of their products available but do check that you are able to use them on your website.
It may seem like a good idea to jump on Google and download someone else's images but are the images really the best you can get and even more important, do you have permission to use them because breach of copyright can end up costing you a lot of money.
Pictures taken on digital cameras are very easy to work with but the files are usually much larger than size required on a web page. These 2 images may look the same but there is a big difference between them.
The difference isn't obvious as they are both displayed at the same size but the source image, on the left is 26 times bigger than the one on the right. If in doubt, click either image and display them full size.
Both pictures will still load so why is this an issue?
The larger one will take 26 times longer to load than the small one and is a waste of valuable resources. This isn't an issue if you have a high connection speed but people using WiFi or a slow connection speed will have to wait a while for it to load and it will use up bandwidth unnecessarily. Users will not know why the page is taking a long time to load and may think the page has crashed and leave your website. The delay will be even longer if your page contains a lot of oversized images.
Looking through our website you will see numerous eye catching images and graphics. Why not let us create similar high quality images and graphics for your website and make your website stand out from the crowd.
There are a few things to bear in mind when creating images for your website. One of the most important aspects is making the image large enough so that visitors can see the detail of the item you are selling. Learning to resize and edit images is a worthwhile skill to learn but if that doesn't interest you we can do all the editing, resizing and retouching required to help make your images sell your products.
These images do not show the details of the coins clearly as the coins themselves are too small within the frame of the image. The product should at least fill the picture frame so the details of the item can be seen.
This image is an improvement on the previous ones but is still a long way from a professional looking image to enhance a web page and help to promote products.
Making the coin fill the picture frame means that visitors to the website can see the fine detail of the coin. If this were on the website of a coin shop, it would of course require 2 images for each coin to show both sides. If the coin had a milled edge or other detail on the edge, more images would be required in order to show as much detail as possible.
This image is a further improvement with the distracting background removed. This can be achieved in a number of ways but the best way is to take the photograph with the object raised above a plain surface. we have developed some tools to achieve this.
What you do with the background depends on the subject of the image. In the case of a coin collection where the image had hard defined edges, the image would be best left without a background.
If you really want to go to town you could animate the image. This can be done in a number of ways depending what result you are aiming to achieve. There are mixed feelings about animation, some people think it looks great while others think it looks cheap and tacky. In truth, it depends on the application, on a 'serious' website it would look out of place but on a 'fun' website it would fit in just fine. This is where design and imagination meet to create something eye catching.
When it comes to the way images are presented on a website the only limit is your imagination but be wary that in your quest for something unusual, to make you stand out from the crowd, you could end up standing out from the crowd for all the wrong reasons.
