Website Image Gallery & Portfolio Enhancements

While good writing is a great way to communicate your message, pictures of your product or service in action are not easily refuted. Let’s face it, no one can deny the power of a set of before and after pictures whether you are a professional landscaper or a plastic surgeon. Pictures are powerful and should not be forsaken in the development of your website. Ultimately, how the pictures are displayed will affect how your company or organization is viewed by your website visitors.

Several options exist for displaying pictures of your work on the internet. When a limited number of images will be used, it is good to display them on regular HTML pages under an appropriate page heading. Each picture must have what is called an “alt” attribute assigned that describes the image to those who might not have images enabled or who are not able to see. When hundreds of pictures are needed, say for fabric or color swatches, a database system might be more appropriate to call the images into place on the web page. Whether you need to display 20, 100, or 1,000 images, the same rules apply.

Preparing images for the internet is very important and will take more time than one might expect. Consider a decent model digital camera. Most people have the ability to snap high-quality images, but in order to use them on a website they must be scaled down quite a bit. Unless your website is providing stock photography, your visitors will not enjoy seeing a full-sized, highest quality image from your camera. Why? Because the top left corner of a 10 mega-pixel camera is going to fill the visitor’s entire screen, and the visitor will be forced to side-scroll or down-scroll to view the image in its entirety.

Scaling is the “art” of resizing and optimizing highest-quality images for use on a website. Typically, the website visitor sees an image gallery. When he or she clicks on a picture, the image opens a new page with an enlarged version of the same picture. This requires the use of two images, a “thumbnail” and a “slide.” Generally speaking, unoptimized and unscaled images will slow down the performance of a website to the point that visitors will never come back. Incidently, this “click and enlarge” method is boring and does nothing to enhance the visitor’s experience or lend credibility to the product or service.

Suppose your hundreds of images are high-quality, scaled, and optimized, how then can Kern Tech Support make your gallery stand-out from your competitors? Simple! By using various technologies to professionally enhance and display your photos. With Flash, Javascript, and CSS, there are many methods to make a website image gallery or portfolio attractive and fun to look at. For example, with CSS we can have the picture pop to a larger version of itself on mouse-over; with Javascript we can cause the entire screen to fade to black and call the image in from the server - like we do on the Bakersfield website portfolio page; and with Flash we can develop elaborate image players and movies.

These technologies cost more to implement than static pictures on a web page, but in the end they make the difference in how your customers view your company or organization. In other words, from a psychological and marketing standpoint, if the presentation on your website is top-notch, the actual product or service you provide your customers is sure to be even better. Give Kern Tech Support a call if you would like an enhanced portfolio website.