Today’s marketing meeting is about presentation. Whether on your blog, your website, or your auction listings, you want to put on your best face. Your presentation should be clean and flawless. One way to do this is through working with your images.
A must for any website is a fast download. No visitor is going to want to hang around, waiting for your high quality images to load. All images should be optimized for the web. Photoshop, of course, is the tried and true leader among image-editing software. However, it’s not cheap, with the current versions $600 price tag. It has a high learning curve, though many resources and tutorials are out there to help guide you.
A good alternative is to seek out an earlier version of the software. I purchased my copy of Photoshop CS3 for $200. I can’t begin to tell you how pleased I am with my purchase. I had the older Photoshop 6. Compared to what I have now, the earlier version was a dinosaur, not user friendly, but user cordial at best.
What I like about using Photoshop is the ability to enhance my pictures, if my lighting wasn’t the best when I photographed them. I can also optimize my pictures for the web, so that the image loads quickly. Because of the variety of supported formats, my images can be saved for a variety of uses, whether it’s on a website or part of my Zazzle store.
Now as far as your code, there are also a couple of tweaks you can do to optimize your site. First, all images should have an alt attribute. This is the text that is displayed if for some reason your image doesn’t. Choose the text careful, concentrating on the longer keywords to describe your image. Instead of “flower painting”, say “original red flower watercolor painting.” This helps with your search engine optimization and is one thing you can do to get a more focused audience looking at your work.
When in Photoshop, look at the image size. Add those attributes as well with width=”" and height=”". Again, anything you can do to make your page load quicker is to your benefit.
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It will look like this: Monday Marketing Meeting–Putting On Your Best Face