Unless you are building a personal website, use graphics only when they are absolutely necessary. Avoid using fanciful animated graphics (e.g. animated GIF and Flash SWF). To give your reader a professional feel, use graphics only when it is required to illustrate for your textual content. However, you can use small logos and banners to liven up your website - remember, you want to give a professional impression to your visitors.

There are a couple of clever things that can be achieved with images:

Animated Images

Images which are in GIF format can be animated. The specific GIF format which allows for animation is GIF89a.

Creating animated GIFs is really very simple. You need to create a small GIF for each frame of your animation. This may result in several GIF files. Then, use a utility such as GIF Construction Set (Win95/NT, 1.2MB), to create a single animated GIF image from your separate GIF files.

This is an example of an animated GIF:


Tips and Tricks

Some tips for creating web-friendly images:



1. Make your images as small (in terms of file size) as possible. Large images which take a long time to download and display are very irritating to users with slow Internet connections.
2. When inserting an image into your HTML page, use the width and height attributes, i.e.:
   <img src="myimage.gif" width="150" height="50">
   This causes the browser to display the text on the page before the image has completed downloading, allowing visitors to read the text, and giving the impression that the page loads quickly.
3. Use a utility such as GIF Construction Set (Win95/NT, 1.2MB) to set the background of your image to transparent. This does not look good if the background of your web page is very busy, and therefore interferes with the look of the image. However, if you have a plain page background, making its background transparent causes it to appear as if it is floating on the page.

Go to Chapter 18