Rightly or wrongly, web developers feel a sense of ownership over their finished work. In the past, whenever a website update was required, the website owner asked the developer to make the change and all was good. Joomla allows site owners to make their own updates but developers get cranky when their hard work is ruined by the site owner. Keep your developer happy (and your site visitors too) by avoiding the following common mistake.
Images, especially those from modern digital cameras, can be very large both in terms of file size and the space they take up on a monitor. When you insert an image into an article, you can choose to resize the dimensions so it is in proportion with the rest of the content. However if you simply change the dimensions, either by specifying new dimensions or dragging the image to make it smaller, you create a problem. If the original image was 1MB, you might think that resizing it in the Joomla editor would result in a smaller file size. However this is not the case. It is physically smaller on the screen, but the file size remains the same. Look at the images below:
Although these images have a different physical size, they both have the same file size. The problem with this approach is the page can take a long time to load. And if you repeat this with several images on the one page, you can end up with a VERY slow loading page which can frustrate your visitor.
To avoid this, resize your images before inserting them into your articles. In the Build a Joomla Website tutorials, I demonstrate how to do this with software you can download to your PC or Mac for free. However there is an even simpler solution available in the form of an online application called Picnik. This is incredibly simple to use, you don't need to register and it's free. The process is:
1. Go to Picnik and click the Get Started button
2. Click the Upload a photo button on the left and choose your desired image from your computer
3. Click the button labeled Resize, enter your new dimensions and click the OK button
4. Click the Save and share tab towards the top right
5. Click the Save Photo button and choose a location on your computer to store the new version of your image.
6. In Joomla, create your article as normal and insert your resized image.
It might take a few attempts to find the ideal image size for your site design but once you know this, it is easy to resize any future images.