Pictures A Critical Ingredient For Any Website Page
Pictures – Do I need a picture for a news / blog item?
Clearly one can publish text on the internet without a picture. It is not a crime but in reality people are attracted to good pictures. You do not have to be a professional photographer to take an OK picture. Being in the right spot at the right time is the critical part. Chances are your phone will do a good enough job. If it is an expensive new phone, you will have to spend a lot to get a better picture from a traditional digital SLR camera.
The file size from a typical phone or digital camera can be large. Even with fast download speeds people do not want you to upload a 10mb photo.
To help you keep your website page fast loading the maximum file for a photo is 2mb which is more than enough for a great result. One more thought Google penalises slow loading pages – if your page is made up of 4 x 10mb pictures it will struggle to get served up on Google.
You can edit your photo either on your PC or online either way just make it so that it is something like 800px wide by 370px deep. Clearly lots of size options are possible, but this is a guide.
The example on this page is 800 x 533 96 dpi and is 62kb which is small – the kind of size Google will be happy with.
If you look at the example photo you will see the corners are rounded and there is the blue shadow – that is created automatically for you.
Can I add more photos to a page? – Yes once you are comfortable creating a basic page. There are various options for adding more pictures to a page.
Take Your Photos And Video (especially) Landscape
Why take photos and video landscape?
Look at a desktop screen or TV – it is landscape. The world was built for landscape long before phones which can view content landscape or portrait.
If you want to take a portrait photo make sure you have a landscape version as well.
When people tell me x is a great website, and I look at it, the common denominator is – it has great pictures. Almost certainly they are going to fill the screen. Not everywhere looks great all the time, but most places can look fantastic, if you simply choose your day and where the sun is. (Having the sun on the back of your head is usually the best place.) Tip take the photo on the highest resolution your device will allow. – Landscape!
