Yes a Picture is worth 1000 Words but Only if it Loads Fast

Pictures are an important part of the online retail industry. Websites are not like traditional stores. Customers have no way to see the product up close and personally, they cannot pick it up and touch it. As online retailers it is our job to do everything we can to ensure that our customers are as well informed as possible about the different products we offer. We achieve this successfully through two methods. We utilize content which in great detail explains what the product is, how it is made, what materials are used to make it, who makes it and what exactly it does. We also use pictures to show what the product looks like so customers can at least have a visual representation of what they are thinking about buying.

Great Product Pictures are Extremely Important

Great product pictures are one of the most important aspects to succeeding online. They will not help you out with the search engines since a search engine has no way to determine what the picture is but they will go a long way towards enticing your potential customers into buying your products. There are some things to consider when setting up pictures of your different products:

Make sure the picture is clear and properly demonstrates what the product is. If the product has multiple different aspects to each side then capture more than one picture showing the varying aspects of the product.
Make sure the picture looks professional. If you are not a good enough photographer to take a professional looking picture then it would be wise to hire a professional to take your product pictures. Amateurish pictures will lead customers to lose trust in your company and may lead to reduced sales.

Make Sure that your pictures file size is as small as possible without greatly compromising the quality of the image. Remember, as many as 30% of users worldwide are still using dialup. A 100KB picture on a dialup modem could add several seconds to your web page’s download time. Most users don’t have a lot of patience for a website that takes a long time to load.

Making Your Pictures Smaller Properly

The most important factor to the overall file size of an image is the actual size of the image. This is one area where you can greatly reduce the size since most digital cameras take a picture which is significantly larger than 99% of the worlds monitor resolution. Resize the image down to a size that will comfortably fit in your website and you will have easily reduced the file size considerably without sacrificing the image quality significantly.

Reduce the image quality to some degree. I know this may sound like it is not a good idea since it leads to a less focused picture but you can actually compress a picture with good software quite considerably without having a major impact on the quality. Many applications can compress a GIF, PNG or JPEG by as much as 35% before seeing a noticeable difference.

Programs for Compressing Images

There are many programs which are designed to compress and resize images. This is by no means a comprehensive list and you may know of better applications to handle this. If you do then please feel free to comment with a product name and it will be added to this list:

Adobe Photoshop – Arguably the most sophisticated image editing software available on the market. Photoshop is not cheap but it does a great job and it has a lot of useful features.

Corel Paint Shop Pro – Paint Shop Pro is an excellent application for editing, resizing and compressing images. It offers many of the features found in Photoshop but it costs a lot less. It is not quite as sophisticated as Photoshop but for many it will suffice

Media Resizer Pro – Media Resizer Pro is an excellent application for people who need to batch resize and compress images. Its compression engine is not as good as Photoshop or Paintshop Pro but it does a good job. Its main benefit is that it automatically adjusts the width, height and compression of each image and then outputs the new version to a folder of your choice. It even automatically crops the image if necessary to create thumb nails which are all the same size.

Summing it Up

Remember, without great pictures you are going to reduce the number of potential sales you have but at the same time if your pictures are too big then it can also lead to fewer sales. The goal should be to have great pictures which are not to large in size.