Let's look at the elements of this page. It has a tiled background graphic instead of a solid color or the default setting of white. It also has a graphic page title instead of a text title. Take a close look at the title. I've chosen a raggedy font for the word "Graphics" and a very sharp font for the phrase "Keep it clean." But if you study them both, you'll notice there is no "fuzz" around the lettering, and no odd little dots around the words. That's because the graphic was composed as a jpg file and then converted to a transparent gif file. A high quality graphics program can make a very clean conversion, but you often see muddy or aliased-- the edges are ragged stair-steps-- graphics on the web. They simply aren't using good enough tools to do the job right. Some color images may lose some quality in the conversion, but converted graphics can always be of good quality.

Gifs and jpgs are the two most common graphic files used on the net and have different functions. Gifs can be smaller and can be made with transparent elements, like the title here. Jpgs can be higher quality.

Here's a picture saved as a jpg, then converted and saved as a gif:

This is a JPG This is a GIF
You can see a slight degradation in the color when it's converted to a gif. The better the quality of the JPG, the more noticable the change.

You can save pictures by right-clicking-- or control-clicking for Mac users-- your mouse on them and selecting "Save Picture As," and saving them to a file.

Here's a small photo that's linked to a larger version of itself:

Touchdown!

Here's a photo that's linked to the homepage:

hosebib

Here's how it looks without a border:

hosebib

What to learn more about making your page look the way you want it to? Visit webdesign.about.com.

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