Homepage Necessities- Graphics!

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The MacDirectory Column - March 30, 1999

Homepage Necessities- Graphics!
By: R.P. Phillips

Well, actually, graphics aren't really necessary in terms of conveying basic information - but I think they are an essential part of a homepage. They add color and style and help express the creator's tastes and personality. While there is an almost endless number of sites where you can obtain graphics for a homepage, I will examine here the ones I am most familiar with - the ones I use.

As a novice-to-amateur designer, I try to limit the graphics I use to three specific areas: scanned and cropped photographs, Mac-oriented GIF images I "borrowed" from other Mac sites, and animations I "borrowed" from animation and/or Mac sites.

Scanning and cropping photographs couldn't be much easier; every scanner I've ever heard of comes with software designed to help the user crop and make simple modifications to pictures, as well as save them in a variety of formats including at least one of the two favorites of the internet: JPEG and GIF. I won't dwell on this area, as scanner software packages vary enormously and hands-on experimentation with your scanner is the best way for you to explore your own resources.

Mac-oriented images are also an essential part of any Made-on-Mac homepage where the creator is proud of using a Macintosh and wishes to express it on his or her site.

NOTE

Make sure there are no copyright violations in the way you plan to use graphics you obtain from other people's web sites and that you comply with any restrictions the creator may have imposed on their use.

There are two specific ways to get these images onto your homepage: link to the image or "Save the image as" to your own computer and add it directly to your homepage. I prefer the second method and it is easy to do. Simply find an image you like, click and hold the mouse button down until a pop-up menu appears, and keep holding the mouse button down until you have highlighted the "Save This Image as" selection on the menu (in Netscape), release and save to your hard disk with a title of your choosing. (In Internet Explorer, you choose "Download Image to Disk" from the pop-up menu.)

Easy enough, but where can you find these remarkable made-on-Mac graphics? There are a lot of different places to find a couple of them; there are many different sites that have several of them, and a few sites that have a lot of them. My two favorite places to go to find and possibly retrieve them are Mac Gallery and Mac Arena.

While there are others out there, these are the first two I found and I seem to turn to them first whenever I'm looking for a Mac GIF for my site.

Animated GIF images are great: Besides adding color and style, they add motion to an otherwise static page. They can be used to draw attention to specific areas, to liven up a page, and/or just to entertain those who happen by. While both Mac Gallery and Mac Arena have animated made-on-Mac graphics, general animation sites are great places just to visit. I not only get to see old cartoon friends, but my two year old loves to watch his favorite cartoon images and/or animals bouncing around and can spend hours going from one animation to another. Again with just two of my favorite sites, for animation:Animation City and Animations by Syruss.

Saving animations to your desktop is the same as saving nonanimated graphics, but there is one prerequisite - you must have the proper program to view these animations. I use such programs as GifBuilder 0.5 (which can also be used to help create your own animated GIFs) or web page creating programs such as Netscape Composer most often.

While I do have an alias browser user listed for no images so I can quickly load and read some text pages when I'm trying to research different subjects, most of my browsing is done with images - if for no other purpose than to see and possibly borrow different images that appeal to me and/or can be used on one of my pages. The wonders of color and animations do add a lot to otherwise dull and drab sites; they can even make a boring site fun to visit. So when you go ahead and make that perfect homepage - remember the graphics and remember to thank all those wonderful people out there who are helping you make that homepage of yours so marvelous with their wonderful, artistic, and fun JPEGs, GIFs, and animations!

Additional Macintosh sites providing images
R.P.Phillips web site: http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Acres/4913/index.html