Irish Website Design Ireland

When it comes to painting, illustration or photography or modelling galleries, you know exactly what you’re looking for. But for many creatives it can be difficult to know what to include in your gallery websites.

The three tips below will help you present your online portfolio in the best way:

1. Keep your gallery simple and uncluttered. Most artist end up opting for a mainly black or white gallery website layout. These colours help frame your images allowing them to be the main focus of the website. I recommend against gaudy colour schemes, flashing images and background looped sound effects that compete with your image for the visitor’s attention.
2. Now the second point is very important. In order for your online art gallery to be useful and successful, it must be easy for you to manage. Adding, editing or deleting images, albums and text descriptions should take only a couple of clicks.

   If your gallery is too complex to use, you will neglect to update it as often as you should. Publishers and potential clients might visit your site regularly and if the images never change they may think you couldn’t be bothered to update your work. This can have a very negative impact on you potential to get work from them. So ensure your gallery website is easy to manage and update it regularly!

3. Yep, I’ve seen it a thousand times; a gallery with beautiful artwork but it’s just a nightmare to navigate the site. Keep your artwork grouped in relevant albums and make sure it’s easy to navigate from one image to the next, and from one album to the next.

   Again, if publishers or potential customers get frustrated trying to view your portfolio gallery they will leave your website and they probably will not come back.

I hope you can see how important these three elements are for the success of your website and ultimately your chances for generating more interest in your work and more orders.

Now you know the secrets to managing a successful online portfolio website, it’s time to get your work online.

Gallery Folio provide affordable, easy to manage and easy to navigate online galleries perfect for illustrators, photographers, painters and models. To find out more check out http://GalleryFolio.com.

.

.

.

Artist Portfolio Websites Tips – Fast Loading Optimised Gallery Images

Theres nothing more frustrating than waiting for what seems and eternity for a website or online image to load.

No doubt you have experienced this yourself, whether because the image that is loading is several megabytes bigger than it needs to be or because your Internet connection is too slow.

Whatever the reason, you will do your online portfolio a great service to remember that people just will not wait all day for your images to load. This can result in lost customers and lost work or sales.

Well, there is a way to minimise the load time problem, and it’s not that hard to do.

Optimise Your Images

Compressing and resizing images will dramatically reduce their size and load time. Don’t be concerned about reduced image display quality either, if you select the correct compression settings this need not suffer.

How To Optimise Images For The Web

So how do you go about compressing your images for the web?

Lets start with your image resolution. The following may seem a little technical but bare with me, you don’t need to understand it, you just have to do it. So briefly I’ll explain about image resolution.

1. Images for print are usually saved as 300 dpi resolution but images for the web are saved as 72 dpi resolution. When you change down your images resolution to 72 dpi you immediately and dramatically reduce the byte size of the image. This can result a difference of several megabytes and that will have a huge impact on image load time.
2. Okay, that’s image resolution discussed, now we want to talk about the actual print size of an image (it’s scale if printed out).Many digital cameras and scanners default settings will produce and image that is far bigger (in scale) than is required for use on the web. We want to ensure that the visitor viewing your gallery will not have to scroll an image to see it in its entirety. Most peoples PC monitor screen resolution is set to 1024 X 768 pixels. You’re image should be smaller than this size so that it’s visible without the need for scrolling. I usually save images for the web at around 600 X 400 pixels.
3. The file type format that you save your image as will also affect the download speed. Artwork and photographs are usually best saved as Jpeg format. Save simple images that have little colour mixing or gradients as Gif. Most graphics software will give you a number of options to further compress the image. It’s worth experimenting with these tools. You will quickly become adapt at optimising images for the web once you are familiar with the process.

Other file formats for saving images include PNG, TIFF, PSD, BITMAP and many more but Jpeg and Gif are the standard and viewable on all PC’s.

Popular Graphics Software For Optimising Images

So now you know how to compress and optimise your images for your website gallery, what software applications can you use?

PhotoShop is the leading graphics software and using the “save for web” options makes compressing images easy. Other popular graphics software you can use includes Paintshop Pro and the free and extremely powerful open-source software “Gimp” (free to download, install and use).

So when compressing and optimising images to ensure the fastest load times for your portfolio gallery remember to change dpi to 72 resolution; reduce the actual print size of the image; and save the image as Jpeg or Gif file format.

Now that you can compress and optimise your images for the web, ensure you have an easy to manage portfolio gallery online to display your work. Check out GalleryFolio.com who offer complete and affordable set-up of excellent, easy to manage and easy to navigate online photo galleries, http://GalleryFolio.com

.

.