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mdknight

Hi there fine people who blog. it is almost Thursday and that means it is time for #Techdaddythursday™ Last week I covered images and social media and if you missed it you can find it here Social Media Post Edition

Today I want to also cover images, but this time specifically for your website and the best practices for those images. Are you sitting comfortably?

Then I shall begin

Words are a large part of what you do for your website, be as we all know images can give those posts a rather serious boost when it comes to people clicking through. But there are things that are very important to do with those images before you press publish

Title Your Images

One of the most important is to change the name of the picture before you upload it. Never ever ever let your image be called IMG_354djdf!.jpg. But what does it matter you say? How can the name have any impact Michael?
Several reasons, the first being that if you ever want to find that image again (and you will) searching for a meaningful name is so much easier than some crappy file name. The second is that file names matter to Google and they help make the web (and your images) easier for everyone to find.

Resize your Images

Now that you have named the image something new, the next step to to make them smaller. That is right smaller is better. Remember that well over 50% of your readers will be reading on their phone and an image that is 5932x3267px will have to be scaled way down to fit on the phone screens, and that takes server power and a large file being sent to the phone (using up your readers data) to send a picture that at best will be displayed at 2436×1125 on the top end phones in the world and that is a best case scenario. Realistically your images should never be larger than 1280×720 or 1024×768 and often smaller will look wonderful on almost all devices include the giant HD monitors I use to perv… err, look at your pictures.

You can use a variety of tools to resize images Like Paint.net, or  GIMP

Compress your Images

Now that you have made you images pixel dimensions smaller the next step is to compress them as much as possible without sacrificing image quality. Thankfully there is a free tool to do just that and it works amazingly well. Take that resized image and put it in TinyPNG which will make that image nice and small, but wait, you have more to do.

Check the metadata

Now that you have that nice small image let’s make sure our camera hasn’t added any metadata that might give up our anonymity. On a windows PC you do this by right clicking on the file, select properties, and then the details tab. Scroll through the info and remove anything that might give you away, and please when you name the file, don’t use the names of the subjects in the filename. That is really easy to see 🙂 On iCult devices you will need some EXIF software to check this. Now, finally, you are ready to upload the image and add it to your post but once you do, please remember to fill out the alt text field. It serves 2 purposes. A) to give words to be read out loud to the visually impaired so that they know what it is a picture of (so be descriptive.)

For example the ALT Text for  this picture would say Profile picture of Michael with a beard for #Techdaddythursday™ And as always if you can fit your SEO keyword in as well without it not being jarring then excellent! And that brings me to the 2nd reason to use the alt text field. Google gives you extra SEO juice for using it so there really isn’t any reason not to do it.

So to sum up

  1. Name your images something that makes it easy to find again.
  2. Make it smaller in pixel dimensions (GIMP is a free tool to do this)
  3. TinyPng it to make the file smaller
  4. Check for metadata you don’t want
  5. Use the Alt Text field always

That wraps up this week’s edition of #techdaddythursday™ Please feel free to ask any question, here in the comments or on Twitter  (DM if you are shy)

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