Adding Pictures to Your Free Equestrian Event Website

If you haven't applied for your free website yet, see CreatingAnEventWebsite.

We told you how to change the textual content of your website in the previous step, now we will move on to uploading your own pictures to make your site even more unique and personal.

Preparing Your Images

When you take a picture with a digital camera or scan a photo in to your computer the image will be far too large to be of use on your website. Before you upload your photos you will need to reduce them to a reasonable size and maybe crop (cut off) edges of the photo that are not required. If you don't have the software to make such changes, we recommend you download Photo Toolkit (now called Photo! Editor) for free from http://www.photo-toolkit.com∞.

Photo! Editor Tips

• Maximise the window, and open the photo you want to use.
• Click the "Crop" button. Click and drag a box around the portion of the image that you want to keep. You can drag each edge of the box to make fine adjustments. Click "OK" when you are happy with the cropping area.
• Click the "Resample" button. Enter the desired width or height of your image in pixels. For photos, you usually get better results if you select the enhancement option "Photo - sharper". Click the "OK" button.
• click the "Save" button and select the "Save As" option. Enter a new meaningful name for this photo. Using a meaningful name will make it easier to find the photo by name when you are selecting it in your maintenance pages. Click "Save" to complete the process.

Photo Sizes

The size of a photo is measured in pixels. A pixels is a single dot that makes up your image.
The homepage of our sample site has two pictures. The first is 180 pixels wide by 171 pixels heigh.

The second is 545 pixels wide by 91 pixels height.

Try to keep the sizes of your pictures as small as possible while still making your website look good. The smaller the pictures the faster the page will load and the happier people browsing your website will be.

View the "Show Help" tab in each maintenance page to find out if there are any restrictions on the sizes of photos used on that page. The "Photos" page for example has maximum sizes. Use the "General settings for all your website" maintenance page to replace the photo shown in the header of every page.

File Types

Photos need to be a file type of ".jpg" or ".jpeg". This type of file is compressed and therefore downloads much quicker when people view your website.
If you have a package that allows you to draw a logo or your own picture, save it as a ".gif". This will ensure the logo appears exactly as you intended it to.

Uploading Your Pictures

Your website maintenance page includes a link "Add / update a picture". Click this link to open the picture upload page.
Now click the browse button and find your photo or picture on your computer, click on the picture followed by the "open" button. If you are replacing an existing picture choose the name of the picture you want to overwrite. Click the "Upload Picture" button to start the upload.

Once the photo is uploaded you can use the maintenance pages that allow photos to be included and select your photo from the lists provided.

Next Step: AddingEventsToYourWebsite
Previous Step : EventWebSiteConfiguration