My husband works in the career services office at a local state university and one thing that he tells his soon-to-be graduating students is when they include an email address on their resume is that it shouldn’t be something like iluvtobedrunk@yahoo.com.

A couple days ago I wrote about creating the right context for your work on your website. That also includes your email address. While a cute or risqué email address like thenextparishilton@gmail.com can seem clever for your personal email, it can send the wrong message to customers, galleries, and anyone else you’ll be contacting for your business.

Productivity 501 has a nice little post called Setup Your Email to Look Professional, which provides 8 tips on ways to set up your business email. You can check it out at:
http://www.productivity501.com/setup-your-email-to-look-professional/262/

This is second in a series of posts about digital images. The topic of this post is about resolution and file size

In the last post of this series talked about the different types of image formats that you can use on the web. In this post, I’ll explain the concept of image resolution and file size and what it means for your images.

Simply put, image resolution refers to the amount detail a digital image has. There are several very technical ways to measure resolution, but the way that’s most useful for you to remember is known as “pixel resolution”.

All digital images are made of little squares called “pixels”. You can see individual pixels by zooming in close to an image like this one below…

Here’s what the image looks like at normal view:

Each pixel helps makes up the whole image. Resolution is measured by how many pixels there are in an inch of the image. So if there are 100 pixels in every inch, that image has a resolution of 100 pixels per inch or 100 ppi. (You may also see the abbreviation for resolution as dpi or dots per inch…no matter the abbreviation…for our purposes it’s pretty much the same principle) The sharpness or the detail of an image depends on its resolution. The more pixels you have in an image, the sharper and more detailed your image will be. So an image at 300 ppi will be much sharper and more detailed than an image at 72 ppi because when you’re lowering your resolution, you’re essentially getting rid of pixels. The less pixels you have, less detailed your images are.

So! This means that the higher the resolution the better for your website, right? Not so fast! When it comes web images higher resolution is not always better. Why? This has to do with “file size”. File size is basically how big in kilobytes, megabytes, or gigabytes an image file is. Don’t mistake image size (which are the actual size dimensions in height and width of an image) with file size. They are two different things. The file size of your image is affected by a number of things, the file format (JPG, GIF, or PNG) the dimensions of your image (the bigger the dimension of an image, the larger the file size), and the resolution. Those images with higher resolution are as a rule larger than the same image, in the same file format as those with lower resolution.

Okay, so what difference does that make? Actually, quite a bit as far as your website is concerned. This has to do with how information is transmitted on the web.

Imagine that the Internet is a series of pipes from one your website to your computer and your image file is like water traveling through those pipes. In order to see your image on your computer screen, it has to travel those series of pipes from your website to your computer.

How fast water travels through a pipe is mostly dependent on two things: 1) the size of the pipe, and 2) the amount of water traveling those pipes. If you have a big pipe, that water zips right through because the water has more room to travel. If you have a small pipe, the water takes a lot longer to travel through because there’s not as much room in the pipe. That’s kind of how it works on the Internet too. This is a concept called bandwidth, which is the amount of data that can travel along a connection. Dial-up connections are like small pipes, data comes through slower because it can’t handle a lot of data at once. The bigger pipe is like your cable modem or DSL line. It’s faster because it can handle a lot more data at once than a dial-up connection can. So how fast a person can load up your image on their computer depends on their “pipe” or on what Internet connection they’re using.

But wait! There’s another part of the equation isn’t there? That part is the amount of water going through the pipe. Image that the amount of water traveling through the pipes represents how big your image file is. An image with a large file size has a lot more water that has to get through those pipes than an image with a smaller file size. That means if your image has a high resolution, it will have a higher file size…which means that it’s going to take a lot longer for that image to load up on your website.

Plus, you must take in account more than just one image. How fast a web page loads up depend on all of the elements on the page…that is the file size all of the graphics on that page and the file size of the HTML page itself.

Now, you can’t control the size of the “pipe”. Rather, you can’t control whether your visitors use dial-up or high speed Internet to surf your website. But you can control the “water” or the file size of your images. One of the ways of doing so is by picking the right resolution for your images. The optimal resolution for the Internet is 72 ppi. Anything lower can decrease the quality of your image. Anything higher won’t increase the quality of what you see, but will increase the file size. So stick to 72 ppi.

By the way, if you are planning on using some of your images for print purposes, say you want to create print catalog or brochure, or you want to have some digital images on hand for PR purposes, you’ll need to have two versions of that image. A resolution of 72 ppi is great for the web and terrible for print because at 72 ppi you eliminate a great amount of detail and results in a fuzzy printed image. This also explains why web graphics looks so lousy when you print them out. At minimum, your images should be about 300 ppi for print…at minimum. If your images are going to be used in a glossy magazine or for high quality prints, they’ll need to be at an even higher resolution than 300 ppi.

You should also remember that you always size your images down, not up. Don’t attempt to take an 72 ppi image and change the resolution to 300 ppi. Once you save an image at a lower resolution…all of that detail you got at a higher resolution is gone forever. Raising the resolution won’t bring the detail back and it will just result in a fuzzy image. The same thing goes for changing the size dimensions of your image. Don’t take a 100 by 200 pixel image or a 2 inch by 3 inch image and convert it to a 500 by 600 pixel image. Again, the detail is gone once you save the image at the smaller size.

Remember…always down…never up.

Next week: Changing the resolution isn’t the only way you can control the file size of your image. Next time we’ll dive into the wild and woolly world of compression.

What kind of context are you creating for your work on the web? What does creating a context mean and why does it matter?

If you are a classical music lover, you may have heard about the interesting experiment that world class violinist Joshua Bell did a while back. According to a Washington Post article, this was an experiment to see if the brilliance of his musical talent would cut through the hustle and bustle of the Washington D.C. rush hour at the Metro. Joshua was wearing jeans, a long sleeved T-shirt, and a baseball cap, and threw a few dollars in his open violin case. He then spent the next 43 minutes playing six classical pieces (starting with Bach’s “Chaconne” which is, I understand, one of the most difficult and exhausting violin pieces to play well). About 1,097 people passed by during the performance (this was in L’Enfant Plaza in downtown Washington DC). So how did one of the best musicians in the world, playing a violin worth about 3.5 million, whose concerts where a “pretty good” seat could set you back at $100 or more do at this impromptu concert?

He got a total of $32.17…not including the money that he put in himself at the beginning.

You could quickly come to the conclusion that the average person has no appreciation for music. You could come to the conclusion that we as a society are becoming a nation of classless boors whose idea of great music stops at American Idol. You could also come to the conclusion that we’re so busy and rushed these days that we can’t even stop to listen to the beauty of some of the greatest music even composed played by one of the best musicians in the world.

I’d say that those conclusions played a big role in this experiment.

But I’d argue that something else was perhaps playing a pretty significant role. Another conclusion is that it was just the wrong context.

Would you expect to see a violinist of Bell’s caliber playing in the local Metro station like an average street performer? Would you expect to see an original Warhol or glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly for sale at your local diner? And if you did, how would you react? With confusion? With skepticism?

It’s basic human behavior to look for context or clues on how to react to something. A sculpture on display on a deserted street corner will get a very different reaction if it was located in the Sculpture Garden at the National Gallery of Art. No matter who created it…no matter how technically good it was. A recent Stanford University study showed that pre-schoolers preferred the taste of foods that came wrapped in McDonald’s packaging to unpackaged foods…even if the food where identical or if they were tasting food that McDonald’s don’t even sell, like carrots.

No matter what you might think about McDonald’s or the power of marketing, it’s a fact that outside information like marketing, location, and other things that have nothing to do with an artist’s talent can influence how people see your work.

So what does all of this have to do with your website? It’s just that context means a lot, especially on the web. Remember that on the web, the only context you give people is the one you create. Everything from the design of your site, your domain name, and your email address, to the copy on your site, the images, and how reliable and fast your site is creates a context for your visitor on how to view your work. The great thing about the web is that unlike physical galleries or art shows, you are in control of almost everything that your visitors will see and experience. Almost…remember that there are things about the web that are beyond our control. But in comparison to other venues, you have a heck of a lot of control.

So take a good long look at your website and everything associated with it. What kind of context have you created for your work?

My mom passed along this tidbit to me…

Apparently there is a virus going around the Internet that’s passed along via email. The subject line of the email will say that you’ve received a postcard from a family member. It will then include a link to the fake postcard which is actually pointing to a malicious virus.

There are several variations on the subject line including:

• You’ve received a greeting card from a school-mate
• You’ve received a greeting card from a class-mate!
• You’ve received a greeting card from a partner

…and so on.

Find out more about this virus on the Urban Legends Reference Pages at:
http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/postcard.asp

Plus, if you want to brush up on email safety, read my past post Avoiding Phising Scams for some basic email security tips

Ahh…the summer’s almost over (although you wouldn’t know it by the 100 degree weather we’ve been having here in Virginia), the kids are returning to school and before you know it the holiday decorations will be appearing at the local shopping centers and malls preparing for the busiest shopping season of the year.

So why I am talking about this now when it’s still August? Because now is the time for you to start getting ready for the holidays.

Did you know that online spending between November and December was over $24.6 billion last year? And that figure is expected to grow!

You can benefit online holiday sales by preparing now. How? By….

• Creating incentives for “early birds” and “last minute procrastinators”
• Giving your customers a reason to do their shopping on your website and not the local mall
• By making your website a great place to do holiday shopping

In this week’s newsletter article, I list ways you can start preparing your website to capture holiday sales. To read the article sign up for the Crafted Webmaster Newsletter for free here: http://www.craftedweb.com/subscribe.html