Web Page Guide

"The Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy."

- Ezra Pound

We all know that one of the draws of the web is the pretty pictures.  However, before we get into how to put pictures on your website, I want to inject a note of caution: if your students are primarily going to be accessing this page from their homes or anywhere off campus, you will want to give serious thought to how long those pretty pictures can take to load.  Yes, most connections and computers are significantly faster today than they were even two or three years ago, but on older computers with older modems, images can take forever and a day to load.

Having said that, let us begin.

As with backgrounds, the first thing you will need to do is find and save your image.  So let's say you're surfing along, oh, here, and decide that this Binkley icon is just what you want.  As before, you will want to make sure there are no copyright issues involved (technically, there probably are some involved in using a comic strip picture, but unless you're actively selling the image, it usually won't come to anything).

As with the background, you save the image by moving the mouse arrow over it and clicking the right mouse button.  This time, you will select "Save image As."  Once again, it is crucial that you save the image in the same folder as your web page.

Now, let's put the image on your page. 

First, make sure your cursor is wherever you want the image to be.

There are two ways you can insert an image.  The longer route is to go to "Insert," select "Picture," and then select "From File."  From there, you find your image file the same way you found the background image file and click on "Okay."  (Ignore that extra box floating in the background).

The shorter route is to click on the little yellow box with the mountain picture on the toolbar, find your file, and click on "Okay."

And viola!  Your image should be there.

If you wish to change the size of your image, you do it the same way you would in Word: click on the image to select it, then move the mouse arrow to one of the little black boxes on the perimeter to get sizing arrows.  Hold down the left mouse button and drag to change the size.

As a note on that: if you've ever tried to change images sizes in Word, you know: you can make an image smaller without any real difficulty.  Making it larger presents problems, mostly having to do with resolution.  If, for example, I try to make Mr. Happy larger, I end up with something like this:

Yech.  Bottom line: to increase image sizes, you really need graphics software.

Now, when you select the image to change its size, you'll notice a toolbar popping up on the bottom of your window.  Front page has all sorts of nifty options for images, including rotating, adding text, beveling, and other options.  We're not going to cover them here.  Why?  For two reasons.  First, there are just too many, and we risk information overload.  Second, this is where bad design choices and bad code creep in.  Some of these effects will show up screwy on Netscape.  If you want to learn them (and some are useful depending on your page), I strongly recommend just setting aside an hour and sitting down to play with them.

Class Web Page Note:

• I don't have a lot of images on my pages, but this is largely because of the nature of the classes.  Obviously, images would be very useful for art, science, even math classes.  math instructors in particular might consider posting equations as images rather than text, because it avoids the possibly of alignment being messed up.

• Images can certainly be used to spice up a lesson (see Mr. Happy).  At the same time, it's worth remembering that those pretty images, especially pretty moving images, can  distract from the very lesson they attract someone to

Moving Along: Links!