FeedFront Magazine Articles

– By Deb Carney a.k.a. Loxly

Web sites need images to break up the text and show your visitors things you want them to see. Taking photos that you specifically want to use on a Web site is different than taking family photos or photos for print production.

First, they don’t have to be huge in size. You simply want an image that is big enough to show what you need, clear and properly exposed. Let’s take this step by step.

Good camera
It doesn’t have to be a DSLR to get good images to use on your Web site. You can use a small camera or even the camera in your phone, as long as it has good optics and exposure settings. The largest size image you want to show on a Web site is about 500×500 pixels, which is very small by today’s camera standards.
But you want that image to be super sharp. If your phone takes blurry underexposed pictures, don’t use it. Most digital cameras are fine for general photography.

If you need to take close ups of products, you will need a better camera, one with a “macro” mode that will let you get close to your subject. Be careful, though, with close up shots that you don’t use a lens that makes the subject distorted (fisheye effect).

And remember that since you don’t need large files you can crop to make the subject bigger.

Hold it Steady
Hold your camera steady when you are taking pictures that you are going to use online. If it is in the evening or at night and you don’t want to use a flash (like night shots in a city for a travel site) lean the camera on a light pole or a mailbox.

Anything that you can set the camera on that won’t move can be used as a makeshift tripod. Even if you have a tripod, some cities and parks don’t allow them to be used in certain areas without a permit.

Good Exposure
For daytime pictures, shooting outdoors in sunlight is usually fine, but avoid shooting directly into the sun. Indoors you want to use a flash to avoid images that are dark or have a yellow overtone to them.

Crop it
Use a photo editing software (most computers come with them now, and there are plenty of free ones) to crop your images and resize them.

The image that comes straight from the camera is WAY too big to use on your Web site. Don’t use the resize tags in your HTML code to make the file fit. Doing that uses valuable bandwidth and slows your page load time.

Open the picture in your editing software and use the crop function to eliminate extra space around your subject. Next resize the image so that it is 500 pixels on its longest edge. Then use File, Save As to save the modified version of your image.

Hopefully these tips will help you take pictures that will spice up your Web site and make a good impression on your site visitors.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 5 here

There are probably more places to host your content for free these days on the internet than there are paid hosts. Between the free sites and social networks where you can have a profile, a page or even a blog, there are many people saying “Why should I host on my own domain?”. And there are just as many people saying “Why would I want to drive people to xxx instead of to my own site?”. Use your own hosted website as a homebase and all those “other places” as traffic cops to get the traffic safely to your home.

You want to own your own content, you don’t want to give it away to another company and you certainly don’t want to worry about being censored or your content “disappearing”. Each “free” host has a catch, each social network has a Terms of Service that allows them to censor your content, and “own” your content. Blogger, Typepad and WordPress.com (the hosted version, not the downloaded version) all have clauses that allow them to remove content that they feel is inappropriate. WordPress.com controls whether you can advertise on your blog there or not. Blogger removed content from a blog that was managed on the blogger host, but was not even actually hosted there! You have the ability to publish from Blogger to your domain and as someone recently discovered, they can remove your content from that domain also. So beware.

Geocities is another example of a place where people hosted for free for years and years and thought they would never have to worry. Yahoo is shutting it down. Several other “free” hosting services through the years have done the same, some vanishing into the night without warning. Hypermart changed from free to paid accounts. If you didn’t upgrade *poof* content was gone.

Free sites have their place, and social networks are certainly great places to have a presence, but keep in mind that all your social marketing should be driving traffic to a central place, and that central place should be under *your* control. A domain you have purchased on hosting you pay for. It can be a simple set of pages that sell your product, a blog that you can change or a complex website, but at the end of the day, you are in control of it. And while we are on the subject, be sure you keep a local backup so that if your host goes down, you can move that content to a new host without worry, and quickly.

Anyone remember NBCi/Xoom.com? More recently, Podango? Facebook, MySpace, Squidoo, Flickr, YouTube and a myriad of other sites are wonderful for creating a presence and connecting with people. But don’t use your Facebook page as your presence on the web. Use it as a funnel to send people to your space where you control the content and the ads. Anytime you rely on another company or their business model to host your content, you are playing with fire.

We recently did a podcast on this subject that you can listen to here, and this article is also published in FeedFront Magazine, which Deborah is a regular contributor to.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 6 here