14 Steps To Graphics & Clip Art for Web Pages

Creating a Web page with photos, clip art or graphics on it can be tricky, especially if you want to use a lot of graphics. Each photo, clip art or graphic you put up makes the page load a little slower. Most people don't want to wait for your Web page to load, they want their Web browsing to be fast. If your Web page takes more than a couple seconds to load, they may click their "back" button and go somewhere else.

For users sake, don't post a lot of graphics, photos or clip art on one Web page unless you use photo thumbnails of the photos or clip art for your readers to click through to. Photo thumbnails are smaller versions of the photo, graphics or clip art. You post them on your Web page with a link to the real photo, graphic or clip art. The Web page will load faster, you can fit more photos, clip art or graphics on one Web page and they can click on the ones they want to see.

Let's say you want to create a photo gallery. You might be tempted to put all your photos on one Web page so your readers can see them all at once. I see this a lot on personal Web sites. If you put big photos or too many photos on the Web page people with a slow connection will not be able to open the Web page because it will take way too long. It will also be annoying to someone with a fast connection.

What Are My Options?

Instead of adding all your photos, graphics or clip art to one Web page you could create a series of Web pages for your photos, graphics or clip art. Put just a few photos or graphics on each Web page and link them all together. At the bottom of each Web page you can create a link to the next Web page and a link to the index page. The index page can have links to all your photo or graphics pages so people can pick and choose from the list.

The other thing you can do is use photo thumbnails. You can put many more photos, clip art or graphics on each Web page if you use photo thumbnails because they are small and don't use a lot of space. They also only take a fraction of the time to load. This means your Web pages will load faster. Your readers can click through to each photo they want to see.

When using photo thumbnails you can either link through to the file itself (ie. photo.gif) or you can create a separate Web page for each photo. The benefit of linking to the file is that it doesn't require any extra work. The benefit to creating a Web page for each photo is that you can create some sort of navigation. You could place links to other photos, to the index page or to other related Web pages on your site.

What Do You Want To Do?

1. Find Clip Art Online and Download it To My Computer

2. Turn a Photo or Graphic Into a Thumbnail

3. Upload Clip Art and Photos From My Computer To My Hosting Service

4. What is the URL of my Graphic?

5. Find a Graphic Page Template

6. Add Graphics To My Page

7. Add Thumbnails and Link To Graphics

8. Create a Separate Page Each Picture With Each Page Linking To The Next

9. Create an Index Page for my Graphics

10. Link to Another Page From My Graphic

11. Link To My Graphics Hosted Elsewhere

12. Keep People From Steeling My Graphics

13. Write Text Over My Graphic

14. Create My Photo Album With a Photo Hosting Service