Images and why we use them in websites
Research suggests that images enhance learning by illustrating the concepts visually and by providing visual memory cues to the viewer. We have been using images to describe, tell stories, and record history since our human evolution.
I have been in a few situations where, if a language barrier between me and the other party exists, we have resorted to a pencil and napkin in order to communicate effectively.
Pictures can convey a message, which might take many thousands of words to describe. This non-textual communication and the visual emotions that the use of images can generate mean they are the perfect medium to complement or replace the text in our web pages:
The previous image could easily take a thousand words to describe, which would look uninteresting to the reader and take up valuable space on our web pages. Instead the picture only utilizes a fraction of the space that our description would use and tells a story in itself.
Not only do images describe a story, a moment in time, or a fantasy situation; they can provide a visual stimulus, which portrays a style or theme and sets a mood for the viewer. Many Joomla! Templates now contain a high percentage of graphical images in order to produce interesting designs and effects, such as this commercial example from http://www.yootheme.com:
Many templates now utilize rounded edges for the graphics, or faded effects, and some create a 3D type effect on our two-dimensional computer screens. This is achieved by using shading and image layering effects. Others use images to create interesting navigation effects which could not be achieved without using these.
Besides the design, navigation, and branding effects that images help provide, inside our content and modules, we use images to advertise and communicate to our site visitors. One important trick as web developers is to make sure our images are as optimized as they can be before asking our viewers to load them into their web browsers. This ensures a pleasant user experience because if a site is slow to load, or images are missing, these can be a big turn-off to your site visitors.
Image formats and which ones to use
Images can often make up 50 percent of a Joomla! website; sometimes even more. These images that get loaded into the browser can be part of your template design, or site images we have loaded into our modules and articles. Choosing an appropriate format for this image content will help optimize the loading times of your web pages, which is one of the most important considerations when building a multimedia rich website:
There are a few simple rules we can use in order to choose an appropriate image format. The most important criterion for the final file is the size. The previous image is exported using Adobe Fireworks on a Mac computer. External image editors such as the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) are good open source solutions for manipulating and optimizing images for the web. GIMP can be downloaded by visiting http://www.gimp.org.
With each image requiring loading by the user’s browser, page-loading times can be easily affected with the quality and quantity of images you use in your web pages. This in turn results in end user frustration (especially on dial-up Internet connections) and loss of site traffic.
Digital images
Before we proceed further into file sizes and file types, it is important to mention a note about digital images. Because all of our web page images are stored or viewed on a computer device, they are in a digital format (an electronic file stored using zeros and ones). A digital image is built up of tiny elements called pixels. Pixels are the building blocks of all digital images and are small adjoining squares in a matrix across the length and width of your image.
Pixels are so small that you cannot easily see them when the image is viewed on your computer screen:
Each pixel is an element containing a single solid color, and when put together all of these tiny dots make up your final image. Usually, more pixels per area make up a higher quality image, but there is a poin t when viewed with the human eye on electronic devices that you cannot actually see the extra detail that the additional pixel’s bring to the image:
The physical dimensions of a digital image are measured in pixels and all digital images have what is called an image resolution (the image height and width dimensions in pixels). It is possible to save your digital images in numerous formats and compressions in order to optimize the file quality and size. Image editing programs, such as Adobe Fireworks, are specifically designed with web optimization and export options:
Lossy and lossless data compression
Data compression is an important part of our digital world. File compression is useful because it helps in reducing the consumption of expensive resources such as transmission bandwidth and computer hard disk space.
Almost all digital images that we use on the web have been resized or compressed to some degree. When editing or saving files in popular software editing programs, many options are provided to help optimize digital images.
Lossy and lossless compression are two terms that describe the compression type of a file, and whether or not the file retains all of the original data once compression and then decompression of that file has taken place. The preferred formats for digital web images (such as JPEG and GIF) all fall into one of the following compression types:
- Lossy
A lossy data compression is one where the compression attempts to eliminate redundant or unnecessary file information. Generally, once a file has been compressed, the information that was lost during compression cannot be recovered again. Hence, it is a degradable compression type, and as the file is compressed and decompressed each time, the quality of the file will suffer from generation loss.
JPEG and MP3 files are good examples of formats that use lossy compression. - Lossless
Lossless file compression makes use of data compression that retains every single bit of data that was in the original file before compression.
Lossless compression is often used when an identical representation of the original data is required once a file has been compressed and then decompressed again. As an example, it is used for the popular ZIP file format. Image formats such as PNG and GIF fall into the lossless compression type.
For now, it is not so important to go into any more detail on these compression types, but the following image formats fall into both of these compression categories. It is possible to optimize your website images by choosing the correct format to save and present them to your site users.
