Working With Digital Images

Introduction
Because text makes up the bulk of the Web’s content, it is most likely inevitable that you’ll end up working with them at some point, unless you favor a terribly basic website. Images are part of the foundation to the internet, comprising the bulk of website interfaces, the navigation of millions of sites, and a considerable amount of a web site’s content. As the Web continues to plow its way into every facet of life, this trend can only continue.  website visitors now expect a certain amount of visual stimulation, just as readers of a magazine expect illustrations or photographs.

Of the many image formats, two formats inparticular are noteably the most popular, GIF and JPG file formats.

JPEG
The JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) format is used primarily for images that require smooth color transitions and continuous tones, such as photographs. JPEG supports millions of colors, and relatively little image detail is lost—at least when compression settings aren’t too high. This is because the format uses lossy compression, which removes information that the eye doesn’t need. As the compression level increases, this information loss becomes increasingly obvious.

Although it’s tricky to define a cutoff point, it’s safe to say that for photographic work where it’s important to retain quality and detail, 50 to 60% compression (40 to 50% quality) is the highest you should go for. Higher compression is sometimes OK in specific circumstances, such as for very small image thumbnails, but even then, it’s best not to go over 70% compression.  If the download time for an image is unacceptably high, you could always try reducing the dimensions rather than the quality—a small, detailed image usually looks better than a large, heavily compressed image. Also, bear in mind that common elements—that is, images that appear on every page of a website, perhaps as part of the interface—will be cached and therefore only need to be downloaded once. Because of this, you can get away with less compression and higher file sizes. 

GIF
GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is in many ways the polar opposite of JPEG—it’s lossless, meaning that there’s no color degradation when images are compressed. However, the format is restricted to a maximum of 256 colors, thereby rendering it ineffective for color photographic images. Using GIF for such images tends to produce banding, in which colors are reduced to the nearest equivalent.

GIF is useful for displaying images with large areas of flat color, such as logos, line art, and type. You should generally avoid using graphics for text on your web pages, but if you do, GIF is the best choice of format. Although GIF is restricted to 256 colors, it’s worth noting that you don’t have to use the same 256 colors every time. Most graphics applications provide a number of palette options, such as perceptual, selective, and Web. The first of those, perceptual, tends to prioritize colors that the human eye is most sensitive to, thereby providing the best color integrity. Selective works in a similar fashion, but balances its color choices with web-safe colors, thereby creating results more likely to be safe across platforms.

The Simple Secrets

Here’s the Secret, whether or not you have the greatest product or service in the world won’t matter if your website is poorly designed.  Furthermore, a poorly done/unprofessional site is not limited to poor graphical design. A professional web design should include - easily accessible content specific to your products and services, easy to navigate throughout, modern colour schemes, consistent font style and color, and a clean, uncluttered layout.

Some common mistakes made, in attempts to draw attention, are:

1) Background music:

Unless you are running a site which promotes a band, it’s a good idea to stay away from background music in your site. It might sound pleasant to you at first, but imagine trying to understand your service or product by reading your content while the same song plays over and over again.  Chances are, if your site has it, your visitors either turn off their speakers or leave all together.

2) Extra large/small text size:

As previously mentioned, user accessibility and navigation is important. You should design the text on your site to be legible and reasonably sized to enable your visitors to read it without straining their eyes.  This means no curly fonts and colour consistency. Likewise, make sure that your navigation is consistent with your visitors’ natural flow.  A short introduction on the main page and a clear presentation of relevant content accessed by a descriptive menu is a good start to ensure your visitor understands how to access your important content.

3) Pop-up windows:

Unless you have a daily special that your visitors actually came to your site to see, it’s not a good idea to draw attention away from your core content window with any sort of pop-up distraction.  If you really need your visitors’ attention drawn to a particular component of your website, emphasis it in your content, not in their faces.

With modern tools today, virtually anyone with a moderate degree of online proficiency can create a website but in such a highly competitive environment, isn’t it worth trusting a professional who can apply standard practices to maximize your online potential?

Web Hosting Basics

By its basic definition, a Web hosting Company is one that provides reliable and accessible space on centrally managed and administered servers for many of the Websites encountered on the Internet. They also offer other services that allow Website owners to send and receive email, make changes to their web pages, operate online stores, etc. Just as you use your computer to store documents, Web hosts use more powerful servers to store the text and image files that are necessary to make a website.  Web hosts then index that website by registering the associated domain name with an authoritative registrar.

Ofcourse with the right tools and know-how, anyone can host a website.  Reliability and accessible bandwidth, however, are the most crucial factors in presentation of the website that could very well be the face to your business.  It’s important, therefore, to hire a hosting company with the pre-established infrastructure to handle those requirements.  It’s all about piece of mind that your site is always available when your prospective customers are trying to access it. 

A good Web host will also regularly backup your data to ensure that it is safeguarded against unexpected losses due to viruses or other potentially harmful agents.

There are typically 3 tiers of Web Hosting Services:

Shared hosting: Typical hosting for a Website with a relatively small amount of data and bandwidth requirements: email, forms, and basic text and images. In a shared hosting environment, your Website files share a server with other customers and are separated using logical methods.  Shared hosting services are typically the least expensive of the 3 tiers.

Dedicated hosting: Best for Websites with large amounts of data, heavy traffic or other complex needs. Dedicated hosting provides a Websites owner with an individual dedicated server.

Colocation hosting: Colocation hosting is typically provided to businesses that own their own server or servers, but would like to leverage the bandwidth, monitoring, and management environment of a hosting provider that has the sufficient infrastructure to meet the business requirements.

Next to effective design the hosting service provider, that you will ultimately dependant on to protect your website and ensure reliability, will be a key factor in the success of your online strategy.

Country Music Artist Chris Thompson’s Website Completed

We’ve completed work on Chris Thompson’s website and the site is now up and running.  Chris Thompson is one of Saskatchewan’s great Country Music gems.  The website features music from Chris Thompson’s new cd as well as a photo gallery including both hi-res media kit photos as well as photos from previous concerts.   Click Here to visit his website and to hear music from his new cd!

Effective Brand Strategy

How your image is conveyed in your website can make or break your business. But before you can even consider placing a slogan or logo on your website, you need to establish an online brand strategy.

An effective online strategy requires absolute knowledge of your market and the products and services that you provide therein.  You need to know what your customers are looking for and how they can equate your products and services to your market quickly and effectively after visiting your website. 

You also need to consider your competition.  Ofcourse, if their online strategy is effective, they’ll have figured out a successful strategy to help them get the message to their customers as well.  So how do you differentiate yourself and standout in your market.  The key is in making people understand why your brand is the solution to their problem.  Easier said than done.  Fundamental to differentiating yourself from the competition is your ability to demonstrate value in your product or service by letting prospective clients know how they can benefit from it.  The most effective way to do this is to break-out your services.  For example, RawkMedia is essentially a web design firm, however, in the website design process, there are essential steps that we’ve categorized as stand-alone products and services like Search Engine Optimization, Corporate Logo Design, or Web Hosting services.

When considering an online strategy, contact a RawkMedia Web Consultant to get started on the right track.  A website, after all, really means nothing unless it’s getting infront of potential customers and effectively selling your products and services to them as the right choice.

Blogs and Your Business

In its infancy, the internet was defined as a means to share information, a forum for idea, news, general communication exchange.  Somewhere along the line, however, the internet took a jagged commercialized left-turn. Today it is a swamp of spam-filled commercial sites aimed at tricking you into clicking here or providing personal information (for later sale) there.  With the web 2.0 movement, there seems to be a growing migration back towards the importance of information exchange with recent developments in content management systems, in particular blogging platforms.

The idea of a “Blog” or “Web Log” began as a simple electronic journal where authors began writing their thoughts, opinions and personal interests in constructive articles published on the Internet.  What began as a simple journal has evolved into powerful content management systems where authors, with little to no HTML programming knowledge, can publish articles instantaneously to the internet and search engines for indexing.

Search engines are picking up on this trend and have begun to favor those websites and forums that offer new and unique content.  What does this mean for business?  This means that a business can not only maintain a consistent relationship with both customers and investors, but can communicate with and be indexed by search engines on an ongoing basis and therefore always be relevant to their market in the search engine’s eyes.

The internet is becoming an extremely dynamic environment and search engines are demanding that you and your business be relevant and keep up.  A blog or news forum is the perfect platform to keep your business in the thick of your market space and the RawkMedia Web Consulting group can help you get into the mix, stay relevant to your market, and keep you website in front of your customers. 

TheRealtyConsultant.ca - New Saskatoon Realtors Website

RawkMedia/SharedEvent has completed development on our most recent project therealtyconsultant.ca.  Slade Desrochers is Saskatoon Realty Executive’s top producing realtor.  His name and face is very well respected in the industry and is the recipient of several awards for performance.  The new website incorporates both up-to-date listings directly from mls.ca as well as google maps integration offering a very dynamic and updated site.  Click Here to visit the new site.  If you are a realtor in need of a similar realtor specific website, please contact us for consultation.