Best Practices for Images

  1. Optimize all images for the web to a maximum of 90% quality.  This will make the image filesize 50% smaller, load in half the time and take up less bandwidth, all without sacrificing quality or image size.
  2. Dont use any special characters.  Use only a-z, 0-9, underscore and dash.  Special characters can cause problems with some older browsers and are not worth the trouble.  It is not a good idea to use spaces, quotes etc in image names.  Use a dashes or underscores instead of spaces in image names.  Ie little-red-wagon.jpg, not little red wagon.jpg
  3. Organize images into folders.  This will allow for easier finding of images and later management.  We have found that putting images into folders by department generally works out very well.
  4. Use keywords in your image names to help with search engine placement.  A name like little-red-wagon.jpg is much better then 123ABC.jpg and will also help to remember what the image is for.
  5. Don’t resize the images on the webpage.  It is better to resize the image before placing it on the webpage as this will ensure that the image loads more quickly.  If you upload a image that is 800×800 pixels and only display it as a 10×10 image it will still take as long to load as if it were displaying at the 800×800 resolution.