ADD GRAPHICS TO YOUR WEBSITE - without losing your mind!

We've heard it over and over again - adding graphics to a website is a GOOD thing. They can generally make your sitemore appealing, illustrate points or products, and providecreative icons for people to click through for moreinformation.So you are developing a website, and you really wantto add cool graphics. But how?Well, you can run out and buy a bunch of expensive graphicsprograms and 'dummies' books to learn how to use them.Or you can sign up for courses, on or off-line, for variousamounts of money. But you'll probably be old and gray by thetime you sort through all the mumbo-jumbo you'll need tosort through, or you'll be stressed to the max, and theopportunity your website originally presented will belong- gone.Adding graphic images to your site should be easy and fun.It is possible to:- find graphics you can use at little or no cost; or- jazz up your own pictures or graphicsThrow the mumbo-jumbo commands, books, and classrooms outthe window. If you just want to find graphics or photos youcan use, start by doing a search on your favorite searchengine(s) for 'royalty-free graphics.' You'll probably bekept busy for quite awhile chasing down the links you'llfind. Many of the sites that provide these graphics alsoinclude instructions or coding to add them directly to yoursite - so you don't have to be a rocket scientist to jazzup your web pages, after all!Here's a few things to remember when creating web graphics:1. Don't Sacrifice Speed For The Price Of QualityYour main webpage should be under 40 KB in size for graphicintensive pages. Since a graphic file usually downloadsslower than a normal text file (i.e. html page), you have toensure that your graphics are small, fast at loadingand visually appealing at the same time.2. Graphics Should Be Appropriate, Not Just Look GoodOne mistake a lot of web developers and Internet marketersmake is putting "cute" online graphics or photos on awebsite just because they look good. This is a greattechnique if the images are relevant, irrelevant imageplacement just creates slower loading pages.3. Don't Use Graphics When You Can Use TextOne logo, no matter how small, could take up to 5 secondsto load on a website. While this may not seem like a greatlength of time, it could mean the difference betweenlosing an impatient customer or getting the sale.If your logos or graphics are based on simple fonts, thenwhy use a graphic when one line of HTML code can producethe same text effect? And it'll take 1/100th of the timeto load that one line of HTML as opposed to the graphic.You can also learn - quickly and easily - how to 'jazz up'your own photos or images to add them to your site. Forexample, if you just need to prepare your GIF or JPG images for the web by compressing them so that they will loadfaster, check out the free, ready-to-use "image cruncher"utilities at http://computer-newbies.com/beveldevil/.This software is really simple to use. It requires noknowledge of computers and it has a fast learning curve.This is just one example of the information that'savailable on the web. With all the free and inexpensiveonline resources available to budding web designers, there'sno excuse not to have a site that's jazzed up just the wayyou want it to be - without having to get a universitydegree or spend six months profit to do it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rick Hunter has more tools for new graphic designersat his website, http://computer-newbies.com/ezgraphics/