Week #2

If I took a picture of Niagara Falls with an 8 megapixel camera and want to include it on my website about famous USA landmarks, but the image includes unwanted tourists on the right side.  The first thing I would do would be crop out the tourists from the right side of the image, leaving just the picture of the falls.  The next thing I would do would be to scale down the size of the image.  Being that the photo was taken with an 8 megapixel camera the resolution will be very high.  That will cause the picture to take up a large amount of space on the screen.  Lowering the pixels per inch (ppi) will help out with the size.  Also, I would chose the dimensions of the photo, this will also ultimately affect the file size and resolution.  For example, maybe I would set the photo at 200 x 550 resolution.  Next I would chose what file type I would save the photo as.  I would most likely chose to save it as a JPEG, that way the file size would be lower but not diminish quality to much.  Lastly, I would chose to save the image for web use.  If I was using Photoshop I would compare the image quality while choosing the lowest possible file size.  That way the image will load quicker on the website.

Readability is how easy it is to read a lot of text, or the whole page of text.  To be readable, generally the text should not be too large or too small.  There should never be a large group of bold, Italic, ALL CAPS, small caps, or script lettering.  In short, the text should be appealing and easy to read.  If your eyes are spinning in circles it probably is not a readable website.  Legibility is how easy it is to recognize short bursts of text, such as headlines or buttons.  Generally a sans serif typeface will be used.  ALL CAPS are not used unless that look it desired.  Generally words typed in all caps have the same look, whereas in lower case the words are distinguished.

Additionally, using web safe colors is something that should be practiced when designing a website.  By practicing the use of web safe colors you guarantee that on every browser your website will look the same.  And to add to web safe coloring you can create hybrid colors that are blends of web safe colors.  Cascading Style Sheets are another way to influence the way your website is designed.  They offer a bit more control over your website than does typical HTML coding.  By adding CSS you can change a websites design completely and override default browser styles.