Providing Photographs for your Website
Providing content for your website is vital to allow Clarke Design to build a site that's about you and your business. Helping us to get the right content in the right place efficiently, will help us to create a better website for you.
Photographs
Photographs are an essential part of any website design; a picture is worth a thousand words they say. Providing us with photographs can be a tricky thing, but with a few simple guidelines we can help you to help us get it right.
Please, Please, Please rename your photographs
If you only do one thing different when sending us photographs, it's renaming them to something more appropriate
Please don't send us photographs called image14.jpg or DSC_0867.jpg - it's meaningless and we might use the wrong photograph on your website. You may know what a certain photograph is of, but we don't - so renaming it helps us to understand.
Rename your photographs so that we both understand which photograph we are talking about. It just makes it easier to work with a photograph named correctly rather than you trying to describe a photograph to us over the phone or in an email.
A few guidelines when renaming a photograph:
- Make it meaningful: after all that's why we are renaming it so try to describe your photograph
- Make it lowercase: it's just easier for everyone
- No fancy characters: you cannot have fancy characters in a file name so just keep it to letters and numbers
- No Spaces: to separate words, please use hyphens; so 'large-blue-widget.jpg' is better than 'large blue widget.jpg'
Renaming photographs is also better for search engines too. Google cannot tell the difference between a monkey eating a banana and the front door of the local Baptist church when it comes to understanding a photograph. It can however read the file name of the photograph, so if you have photographs called 'image2.jpg' and 'left-handed-cross-head-screwdriver.jpg' which one do you think Google can understand better?
Don't crop or amend your photographs
When sending your photographs, BIGGER is always better. So we ask that you do not crop, trim or make smaller your original photographs.
Send them to us unaltered, don't try to amend them in any way (other than renaming them). We have all the right tools to do this and having the original, full-size photographs allows us to do this in an appropriate way for your website.
Don't embed photographs in documents
Many people send us documents (usually Microsoft Word or Microsoft PowerPoint) containing photographs. This is far from the best way to send us images and photographs, for many reasons.
- We need to extract the photographs from the document. This just takes us more time.
- You can lose the nice file name you've just spent time coming up with, as internally Word can use its own naming standards.
- You lose quality. Images inside documents may not be as high quality as the original image once they are extracted.
So please just attach each photograph to an email or use one of the services below to send larger photographs to Clarke Design.
Sending us lots of photographs
If you need to send over a couple of photographs, just attach them to an email and send them over. Most email system can send one or two large format photographs quite easily by email.
If however you are sending us a large number of photographs, email will grind to a halt after the first few, so you'll need to resort to a few other methods.
DropBox is an excellent tool for sharing files, documents, images and photographs. It's free initially too.
Just create a folder, add all of the photographs you want to share into it and then share that folder with us to our usual email address. We'll get notified and can download the photographs as we need them.
- Dropsend: If you have a very large file to send or a single ZIP file with many photographs in it, this free service is a great way to send a huge file over the internet.
- WeTransfer: WeTransfer is a free service to send big or small files from A to B
Don't forget too that you can always send us a CD, DVD or USB memory stick full of photographs. We'll always return it back to you.