4 Different Image Formats To Use On Lakeland Website Design

To be a great web designer and developer, once must know about the different image formats he can use both on Lakeland website design and off the web. The knowledge allows a web developer to make the proper decisions about what image format to use in any given situation. Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each format will give the web developer confidence in deciding what’s best for the website.

JPG

This is, perhaps, the most common image format used on the web. It is compatible with almost all software, tools, and programs. It also has a small size which makes optimization better. Websites load faster when they use JPG image files because it has a small file size. However, after an image is compressed as a JPG file, it loses some of the quality of the original image. Every time the photos is re-saved, the number of artifacts increases. Artifacts refer to the details on the edge of the main subject on the photo.

PNG

PNG boats of lossless compression. This means that no quality was lost when it’s compressed and re-saved. However, PNG has a very large size, which does not make it ideal for websites as it can cause them to load slower. For example, an image saved as a JPG file will only be 11KB in size while the same image as PNG will eat up 43KB of your site’s bandwidth. PNG is best used for graphical images and images that use less than 16 colors.

GIF

You probably know GIF as animated images. That’s slowly dying now because it requires a lot of data. However, you can still use GIF to add a bit of purposeful animation to your website since it can attract the attention of web visitors. GIF remains to be the choice for limited color images that need to be small in size. Photos saved as GIF can be compressed but there is a very noticeable loss in quality. Often, the images look grainy when they are saved as GIF.

TIF

This is the highest quality image format you can use, but it’s not advisable for web use. Rather, you can use TIF if you need a print out of the image. It shouldn’t be used on the Lakeland website design. You can keep a TIF copy of the original photos because it has lossless compression. But if you are going to use an image for the web, convert it to JPG or PNG for better quality.