How to Prepare Images for Your Auction Ad

You go to load an auction Ad,you stare at the your monitor waiting for the image to appear. It finally appears but it took several minutes and you are getting angry.You go to another Ad and this one takes 4 minutes.After a while you give up on these slow loading Ads and skip on to another. If this sounds all too familar, You are not alone. Most sellers don't know how to make an Ad right.

If you want to sell at online auctions and make top dollar, read on.

Images are an essential ingredient for your Ad.You want potenial buyers to have an aesthetically pleasing experience. Properly preparing your images is necessary to the appearance of your Ad.

Web graphics for Ads fall into two file formats:

These Image File Formats are GIF, JPEG

1. Graphics Interchange Format (GIF)

GIF is limited to a displaying of 256 colors. A GIF inage is a "lossless" format. This means that as the image is compressed, no information is lost.

Types of GIFs

Animated GIFs allow a playback of a sequence of still images that create the illusion of animation. Animated GIF files are a sequence of images that reload from a browser's cache and replay to simulate motion.

Transparent GIF

An advantage that a GIF has over a JPEG image is that you can make the background color of the image transparent. This technique can make your item appear to float in space and not limit you to a standard Ad background.

Interlaced GIF

Graphic interlacing is unique to GIFS. You've seen this on many web sites.It's the prcess that create that"fuzzy-to-sharp" animated effect when an image is loading.The primary benefit of interlacing is that it gives the viewer a quick preview of the full image,while it downloads into the browser.

When to use a GIFS in your Ad:

Buttons, bullets and navigational tools that accent your Ad or when your item image has only a few colors. Interlacing is best for all GIF image because ti will generate a viewable image quickly.

2. Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG)

This format is capable of much greater color depth than GIFs. A JPEG image can contain up to 24 bits of color information This is three times that of what most users can see.

When to use a JPEG in your Ad:

JPEG provide use for brilliant colors and support for complex images. this format should be used when your image is detailed with many colors. Remember that since must users can't see a high resolution images, that a 3:1 or 33% compression will result in a fast loading image that looks as good as it gets to most.

Be sure to read all about Image Compression techniques with our Tutorial

A little about thumbnails:

Thumbnails are a small, version of a large image. The proper use of thumbnails should allow a user to click on it or a link and jump to another page were a larger version of the same image is displayed. The buyer can see many different, small images on Ad without having to wait for larger files of the larger images to load. If this appeals to you use our Thumbnails tutorial.

Knowing what types of graphics to use and when to use them for your Ad will help you avoid buyers clicking away before your Ad loads.

Remember that our Image Hosting limits your Images to under 60 K Bytes.
It not because we're mean.
It's because we want you to sell and make grat profits.