Use Photographs to Add Punch to Your Campaign Website
First impressions make a big difference, and one of the most overlooked elements of a campaign website is the photographs. What’s the point of a well-designed campaign website if the visitors are going to encounter blurry, grainy or oddly-pixelated photographs? The photographs on your website should promote the very best aspects of your campaign, whatever that might be.
Ideally, any photographs on your website should be taken by a professional photographer. In reality, many of them will not be, especially photos of a candidate with a notable person.
Crop your images for maximum impact. A nice feature of the web is that images do not have to be a set size. You can crop images vertically or horizontally for the best presentation.
Compress your images as much as possible without losing image quality before you post them so that they will download quickly.
If you have a large number of photographs to display, such as a campaign event, consider uploading and linking out to photo sharing websites. The most popular of these sites include Flikr, Shutterfly, Snapfish or Picasa*. You can organize your photos by ‘albums’, so they won’t have to take up too much space on your own website.
Two image formats are commonly used for the web, GIF and JPEG. GIF is short for Graphics Interchange Format. JPEG is short for Joint Photographers Experts Group.
The GIF format is ideal for solid color images like logos, cartoons, and text stored as graphics. Use GIF when there are large areas of uniform color and the total number of colors is less than 256.
For natural, photographic, or multi-color images, JPEG is best. JPEG’s palette supports 16 million colors.
Proper use of color correction, cropping and compression help give your photographs that extra visual punch. Creating and editing graphics requires software, such as Adobe Photoshop or Jasc Paint Shop Pro.
We often review and help edit images for Online Candidate Hosting clients.
* Picasa is a software application for organizing and editing digital photos. It is available as a free download.
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