Sure, YouTube is doing well with its plethora of video clips. But most websites should still use still photos as their main medium to give users some measure of tangibility. Our experience as a professional photographer goes back to the Nixon era and continues to this new digital age.

One aspect about the new digital images is their lack of color depth compared to film. The film industry in the U.S. has always sold color film that exaggerated color: reds are way red, greens are very green, etc. Digital cameras render image color more neutrally, making many campus scenes seem drab compared to the carnival explosion of color we have all grown up with.

This diminished color saturation of digital images is further enervated by LCD display screens that many of today's users have for their computers and laptops. LCDs don't blossom colors like the old cathode ray tubes. The cure is to bring the images into PhotoShop and ramp up the saturation levels to what most people expect. The campus experience is a dream come true for many so why not show it off in its full "Technicolor" glory?

We mention this because we know not many colleges are showing their photo images in their best color and it's an easy fix.

Our expertise goes beyond optimizing images to displaying them in the most user-friendly way, giving the highest level of tangibility. The demonstration in the left sidebar illustrates one of the new modern tools of website imagery. There are several programs that accomplish this same effect, but we like Thickbox, because it's open source, relatively simple to deploy and works very well across browsers/platforms for most all users.

One of its main features is the ability to size the image to fit any user's screen. So if a particular user has their monitors set low at 800x600 pixels, it will fill [and NOT overflow] that screen. However, if they are viewing at 1280x1024, it will fill that one as well. It comes with a built-in navigation carousel. What more could you want?! But very few college websites use anything like this. We've seen several that use image viewing utilities that are unnecessarily complex and complicated, thinking their prospect audience will be dazzled and instead are challenged.

Contact Us to find out the details on how image deployment is one of the most important aspects of any website.