Sourcing and optimising images for websites

07 June 2007 - By Sean Fishlock

The difference between a good design and a great design is very often images.  But finding the right image and optimising it for use on a website has been difficult - until now.

The old adage that a picture tells a thousand words is perhaps no more applicable than to websites.  On the world wide web, user attention spans are short and you have just a few seconds to effectively convey your key messages.  Images become very important in capturing your audience.

Today's content management technology allows you to control many of the images on your site.  With this comes great responsibility.

One of the most difficult tasks in any web or Intranet project is finding suitable images to complement the content, not just for the images you add, but for the essential components of the web design.

Once you have selected your perfect image, it is often the case that it will have expensive royalty fees, copyright restrictions and conditions for use attached to it.  You should never hotlink images from other sites or misuse image copyright - the penalties can be severe.  There are intelligent "spider" software now that are very adept at tracking down infringements. This all can be very confusing for the uninitiated.  Sometimes it can be tempting to just take your own, but that too has significant downsides.

The problem doesn't stop there.  You then need to get the image to fit in your website.  This means you might need to treat it with various effects using an image editor like Photoshop or Irfanview to crop, resize it and optimise it for use with your website.  You may even wish to animate it, using Flash or the like, to make it stand out.  Not everyone has the time or money to be stuffing around with images like this.

There is also more to it than meets the eye.  Images need to be tagged with a range of metadata to make them search engine friendly and suitable alt tags to make them accessibility compliant.  Then there are photo sharing sites like Flickr that you may wish to make them available to.  These technical considerations are no less important.

Fortunately there are easier ways, and I'll explore just  some of them now.

There are many sources that provide good quality, royalty free images for use with websites.  Here is a brief list:

  • Wikimedia Commons - has a great collection of mostly free licenced images, including many archived images from collections which have expired copyright.  Image quality is getting better all the time. Look for GPL licenced images as they are completely free.  Other images may require you to credit the copyright holder.
  • stock.xchng - has a lot of images, but not as many people images as other sites
  • Dreamstime - a few more people images and better quality
  • iStockPhoto - probably the best quality of the royalty free image sites

These sites often include very powerful search mechanisms, which enable you to hone in on images by subject, type or even colour.  We know them intimately and our designers are skilled at finding the right ones for each job.  We make image selection an integral part of our design consultation process.  Browse our online portfolio, and you will see it in practice.

Our Freestyler 5 system has an advantage over many other web authoring tools in that it has built in functions which automatically optimise, resize and crop your images.  This makes adding images a breeze and can effectively save you a substantial amount of time and effort.  In addition, Freestyler allows you to add images in bulk into a shared media gallery, giving multiple editors an approved source of images.  Freestyler also handles the metadata entry, making your web images accessible and search engine friendly.

Using website templates and today's imaging technologies, you can have effects applied dynamically to give them a consistent look and fit into the look of the website no matter what image.  Many of our websites feature images that automatically appear in classy frames, are modified with a variety of effects such as greyscale, cross-fades.  All this means that you don't need a licence for Photoshop or to have to read instruction books of thousands of pages.

If you are stuck in the image rut and need some piece of mind, you know who to call.

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