Image size for website

<p>I'm starting out on a long overdue update of my website. What size do others make the photographs they feature; and is there a logic for this choice beyond "display resolutions are bigger than they used to be?</p>

<p>Thanks</p>

<p>2 related questions to answer to yourself: What might your customer be on? How tiny does an image have to be to be not very valuable when stolen?<br>

Hints: the modern trend seems to be browsing the Internet on a tablet for infotainment and shopping purposes. Laptops are very popular too. So did screens really get bigger? Shouldn't everybody desiring your work as the background image of their fairly high res screen paypal you $1? <br>

Whatever you decide to do: Try the result on a variety of devices. - If you want to go big, could you maybe include a tiny version hidden behind a "Have mercy with my 10" screen!" button on top of your page?</p>

<p>I agree to make sure you design the Website for the range of devices, from large PC's or Mac's, to tablets and smart phones. If you do the work yourself, most Web design software packages have the tools to design for all devices, either by how it formats the windows to developing specific pages for different sizes and resolution. And make sure you test it on the range of browsers, as each use different interpretations of W3C standards.</p>

<p>Yes, any decent content framework/CMS (content management system) is already going to have mechanisms in place to recognize the device that's visiting the site, and to note the resolution of the display being used. There will be CSS there to re-arrange things accordingly. But importantly, the CMS will also prepare versions of the images at different resolutions appropriate to each use of them (so that the browser isn't asked to down-size a too-big file after downloading more data than it needed in the first place, and usually doing a bad job of it, visually). <br /><br />So a lot of this can be easy and relatively transparent to you as a maintainer of the site's content ... but it depends on your having chosen a CMS that handles this for you, or on your willingness to deal with it manually through providing multiple images sizes and handling the CSS correctly. It's a lot easier to let a CMS deal with it automatically, needless to say.</p>

<p>One thing to add to what Matt says, many CMS systems will be able to take a large file and scale it to whatever you want. For WordPress, when you insert an image into a post or page, there's a choice on size. The scaling for mobile devices is automatic. I generally size things to 900px on the long side, choose a size for web display which depends on the type of page it goes on, and let WordPress pick the smaller sizes for devices. As a result, with these systems, the size you make your images isn't critical as long as they are the largest size you might want to display.</p>