Images on a Website

Almost every website contains at least one image file. It could be a thumbnail, a photo, an artwork, or it can be a background design of the website. This brief article presents a glimpse on how webmasters incorporate images on their site.

The two most common image formats on the web have an extension of either .jpg or .gif. Jpg is designed for photo-quality images while GIF is mainly used for thumbnails and small animations on websites. The downside to jpg is that it cannot contain animated images while the downside to GIF is that it cannot contain a lot of colors.

Webmasters often optimize images to make sure that the website loads fast. The result of the final image (after optimization) could be seen as pixelated but it would be enough to get across the message that the webmaster intended it to be. Whether the image is a banner advertisement or a thumbnail that would open up a bigger picture, webmasters optimize them just enough that visitors can see what the advertisment is about or what the visitor can expect to see after clicking a thumbnail in a gallery.

Usually when you view a source of a webpage, you might see a line like this:

This means that: 1. The image does not contain a border. Most images on websites do not have borders and therefore, webmasters may have attached this code (or a similar code). 2. The image is called newsbutton.jpg. If the image name is changed, either the browser will not display an image, or, the brwoser will display a different image. 3. The size of the image is set to a width of 100 pixels and 40 pixels for the height. If the webmaster did not set up the dimensions in the code, the browser might display/resize the image for which the webmaster was not intending it to be. 4. After clicking the image, the browser will refresh to show a webpage named right.htm

These days, many webmasters use flash on their sites. In a flash-based website, the visitors cannot just right-click save an image to their hardrive. The images are encoded in the flash file and the visitors may not have a way to save the image that they want.