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Building
Graphics
Building graphics could be tricky for the beginner,
so if you are not experienced in creating graphics,
you will be plesantly surprised to find that there
are ready-made free graphics on the web you can use.
Just do a search for "free graphics" and you will
find many of them. You may want to disable javascript
on your browser temporary while you venture to find
these sites because many of them are not genuine graphics
provider. When you go to their site you will encounter
many pop-ups, redirections, pop-unders etc etc. It
could be a very frustrating experience indeed.
If you have a bit of time on your hands, then you can
try learning to create your own graphics.
Remember that ultimitely, people will stay at your
site because of its text contents, not the graphics. So
don't over do the graphics, especially huge graphics
that takes a long time to load!
Most graphics software contains tutorials that will
teach you how to use the software. The trick is not
to jump straight into them! Start with file->new with
any software to get a blank canvas. After that, don't
be scared to experiment! Save your work often, so if
you do something that cannot be undone, you can load
the saved file.
After you have a graphic that you are satisfied with
(hopefully proud of), then you need to use "save-as"
or "export" to save a compressed version of the end
product in a format recognised by web browsers.
The following shows the differences between the four
image formats that are used for the web.
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Differences
between differnt image formats:
GIF
Better for images with large patches
of a same colour.
special note - Of the four formats, only GIFs can be animated.
JPEG
Better for images with many different
colours such as photographs or graphics
with a gradients.
special note - Of the four formats,
only JPEG images are 'lossy' (They
lose some information everytime you
edit
it and
save). The solution in to
keep a master file in a lossless format and
export to JEPG only at the end.
special note 2 - Of the four formats, only
JPEG cannot have transparent areas.
PNG-8
Better for images with large patches
of a same colour.
special note - PNGs are not recognised
with earlier browsers.
special note 2 - PNG-8 often compress
better than GIFs, so you get a smaller
file.
PNG-24
Better for images with many different
colours such as photographs or graphics
with a gradients.
special note - PNGs are not recognised
with earlier browsers.
special note 2 - Can have degrees of
transparency.
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