design your own philatelic website

A philatelic stamp site without stamp images! - this is something unimaginable. You need a good scanner to scan your stamp images. But however much you try the image you get is never upright, bright or sharp enough. You will have to resize the image and optimise it to reduce its size and make it load faster. I have used the Jasc Paintshop Pro. An excellent package for image processing. The site also has tutorials on using the package.

Place your images and the text judiciously. Do not overload the page with lots of text or lots of images. Remember images take a long time to load. Once upon a time I used to switch off images while browsing because I could waste time to see the images - most of which were some irritating animations anyway. In case you have to display a specific item which has a large size image file use a thumbnail.

A thumbnail is a smaller resized image which does not have all the details but load faster. You can link this to a bigger image. Indicate the size of the  image that will be loaded by clicking on the thumbnail. Always use alternative text for each image. This indicates to the visitor what the image is about in text form.

Thumbnails can be created by resizing the images and reducing the quality. Save images as JPEGs. They have more colour and are smaller in size. Use a GIF format to show postmarks. You can make the background transparent to display only the postmark. Paint Shop Pro optimises the image for the web. You can adjust the quality and view the results before saving it.

Some of the capabilities of a Image Processing software can be seen on the right. This is just the basic operation that are available.

Wow the site pages look good - Lets jazz them a little bit with Animations, JavaScript and Forms.

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