PICTURES FOR THE WEB

can be made in a number of ways:

DRAW YOUR OWN

Your own drawings can be saved as computer files using a scanner.

DIGITAL PHOTOS

Use a digital camera to take pictures. (Or an ordinary camera and scan them in.)

CREATE WITH DRAWING SOFTWARE

Using software packages like Paint Shop Pro you can make all sorts of images, including fancy lettering for titles.

USE EXISTING IMAGES

You can often find images that you might like to use while you are surfing other web pages. Take care to check that the person who made them says that you are free to take them, (or you might be breaking the law), then just right click on the image and choose 'save as' from the pop-up menu.

USE CLIP-ART

Clip art is widely available on CD's which can be bought quite cheaply, but sometimes comes free on magazine cover-disks.

Saving Images

Make sure that you save them either as filename.gif or as filename.jpeg. Gif (pronounced with a soft g as in giraffe) is most suitable for hand drawn images, particularly black and white ones, while jpeg (pronounced jay-peg) is most suitable for photographs. Most software allows you to set the compression rate for jpeg files, and if so you can usually save at 50% compression without visibly losing quality. At this rate of compression the file only uses half as much memory as it would do before compression, and so it will be quicker for browsers to download from the web.

Putting Images On Your Page

While you're typing your page in Word, and before you save it as an HTML file, click the mouse to put the insertion point where you want the image to appear. Then just choose 'picture from file' or 'clipart' from the drop-down menu, and your picture will appear in the page. The only other thing you have to do is to 'upload' the files containing the pictures along with the files containing your pages. The pictures aren't actually kept in the page document, just an instruction to the browser to get the picture and display it.

Back to display............Forward to animations
Last Updated: May 19th, 1999