I’m working on my author website. The images are so very important to engage the imagination of the reader.
When I am posting about my books, I like to include a copy of my book cover and images that illustrate the themes and characters in my books.
When I’m posting about the writers life, I like to include photos as well.
But appearance isn’t everything when I display photos on my website. They also have to display correctly and they have to be sized appropriately for a web-site. The first question is how do you want to crop or resize your photo to show the strongest image possible.
The second question is to determine how many kilobites to use. Unlike in regular photography, when you are displaying pictures on your website, more is not better. If you use too high of a resolution, it will slow down your website. A slow website is bad for the reader’s experience and you don’t want them to click away while they are waiting for your images to load. Search engines also downgrade sites that have a slow loading time.
I am using the Divi Theme for my website and mostly I am concerned about how the featured image in a post will appear. Divi recommends that pictures be cropped and resized before you upload them to your site.
As a rule, the feature image on my blog posts fills two-thirds of the blog page, so the appropriate size would be 700 x 394 pixels. In terms of maximum size for an image, in any event, do not use a photo of more than 2500 pixels wide by 2500 pixels tall or your upload may fail. In terms of resizing, the size Divi recommends is between 60kb and 200kb.
I use free software to crop my pictures and then to shrink them to the appropirate size.
To crop my pictures I go to: https://ipiccy.com/
To shrink my pictures I use: https://tinypng.com/
This is not the only way to resize picures. My writer friend, Suzanne, uses Photoshop to edit her photos. Photoshop has an annual subscription fee and I have decided to use the free software.The important thing is to find software that works for you.