Web Graphics

There is no real mystery in preparing images for the Web.

Producing Web Graphics is simply finding an acceptable compromise between quality and the time that it takes to download. In rural Ireland, where Ballybar Solutions is based, it is usual to have a modem connection speed of 28.8 kb/s. If you are looking at this using broadband, you will have forgotten how frustrating opening a Web site can be.

A connection speed of about 33.6 kb/s actually means that you can download approximately 3 kBytes of an image every second. A 1800 kByte image, like the original of the one shown, would take more than 10 minutes to download. By careful compression, this can be reduced to a few seconds.

To illustrate, the image on the right has a true download time of 10 minutes, which has been reduced to 3 seconds. The quality is still reasonable, even with this huge compression.

Ballybar Solutions offers photographic services including:

• Photography using a high quality digital camera (Canon EOS300D)
• Scanning and digitising existing photographs and materials (subject to copyright considerations)
• Processing photographs
• Preparing images for the Web

If you have images on your Web site, it is worth noting - 'If the first page takes more than 20 seconds to download, the viewer is likely to give up and go elsewhere'.