New Webmasters » Building Content

Companies That Suck At E-Commerce

corbyboy — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 14:59:21 +0000

Online sales for 2007 were estimated to be around US $259 billion. Most of the world’s leading retail brands have online presences and nearly all of those allow you to shop online.

Online sales is a lucrative market for a big brand to get into. Many people like the convenience of shopping from home and being able to compare prices before the make a purchase. You would think that these companies would put a huge amount of effort into making the shopping experience as comfortable and straightforward as possible. Well, you would be wrong. Sometimes the only conclusion you can draw on some of these websites is that they don’t want your money.

In this article I have illustrated some of the stupid things that e-commerce websites do that turns visitors off.

Don’t Spend Money On Marketing If You Are Going To Neglect The Basics

Online retailers pay tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars on content managament and product catalogue software. Why splash out on all this money if it can’t do the basic properly? Why spend money on pay-per-click marketing if you are going to neglect the SEO basics.

Take Waterstones, the online book seller, as an example. While each page contains a meta keyword and description tag, the title on every category page is the same. It simply reads Welcome to Waterstones.com. If that was the title you were presented with on a search result page, would you click on it? No, thought not.

Another basic SEO failing on many e-commerce sites are poor URL choices. Many online retailers (particularly in the UK it seems) use the same catalogue software and the following are all the homepage URLs from a few of them.

http://www.missselfridge.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/TopCategoriesDisplay?storeId=12554&catalogId=20555
http://www.homedepot.ca/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Home?storeId=10051&catalogId=10051&langId=-15
http://www.homebase.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/StoreCatalogDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=20001

Compare these two URLs. They are both from major UK electrical retailers and both point to that company’s page for vacuum cleaners. Which would you rather click in a search engine result?

http://www.currys.co.uk/martprd/store/cur_page.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@0129255136.1222344286@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccekadeffffejdjcflgceggdhhmdgmi.0&page=Category&category_oid=-30615&fm=4&sm=7&tm=undefined
http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/subhub/80/Vacuum-Cleaners

Don’t Make Me Register Before Checkout

It is one thing asking a customer if they wish to register with your site so their information can be saved, but it should never be a requirement. If I wish to enter my details and my credit card information every time I visit, that’s up to me. This is a crime perpetrated by both Woolworths and Currys in the UK

Don’t make me register before I can use the site

Using Asda as an example again, on the home shopping section of their website you are required to put in your postal code to check if they can deliver to your area. This is a fair requirement – there is no point in doing shopping if they can’t deliver to you. The problem is that after you have checked your postal code, you can’t even start shopping until you have fully registered, which includes the frustratingly inane question that you seem to get everywhere – “where did you hear about us.” You can browse the shop but you get an error message when you try to add something to your basket.

Show Me Alternative Products, Not Error Pages

Thomas Cook and First Choice are two of the most popular holiday travel agents in the UK. Let’s compare how their websites handle when they cannot find what we have searched for. The first screenshot shows the Thomas Cook website.

Where is the first place you are going to click after this? Most likely to another website. Compare how First Choice handles this error below.

One Website – One Registration

ASDA, the UKs second largest supermarket (owned by Walmart) has a website that allows you to do your grocery shopping online but also buy large electrical items, CDs and DVDs, flowers and even mobile phones. Sounds great, but what’s the drawback? You have to register separately for each section of the website. This is absolute lunacy!

Even more annoyingly, say you add some flowers to your shopping cart and go and browse the DVDs, when you return to the flower section your shopping cart is empty. We are using Asda as an example quite a lot, but they seem to do so much wrong.

Don’t Distract Me At The Checkout

The object of an e-commerce site is to get people to buy things. When they have added a product to their basket and are at the checkout, this is what they are trying to do. Enable them to complete their transaction and distract them as little as possible. The checkout is not the place to list the latest special offers or allow the visitor to browse categories. A link back to the homepage is OK, but the only clicks they should be able to make are ones that take them forward in the buying process. Don’t make it too easy for them to abandon their order.

Amazon’s checkout is the perfect example of how to build a good checkout system.

Tell Me The Real Price From The Start

For this example we will look at two UK airlines – Ryanair and Easyjet. Both are very popular low-cost airlines and they both take online bookings. Let’s look at how the prices change through the booking process.

A search on Ryanair gives a price of

Where to Obtain the Best Web Images

corbyboy — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 12:26:20 +0000

Images are used on practically every website on the Internet. Even websites like this one that focus on content use images for a multitude of reasons. They are used for everything from product illustrations on Amazon to article icons on Sitepoint.

When it comes to acquiring an image the three main options you have are:

Use stock images (either free or paid for)
Hire a photographer or graphic designer to produce a custom image or photograph
Take you own pictures or produce your own graphics

Stock Images

Sunburts image from stock.xchng

Stock images can be either free or paid for. Either way each image will have certain usgae restrictions so it is important to check whether you can use the image you want for the purpose you need.

Stock images are a popular choice for a lot of website developers. Not only are they free, but they are easy to acquire as there are plenty of good quality websites that provide them. The major drawbacks of using stock images is that all the good ones will have been used over and over again. This will make them unacceptable for any corporate sites and a lot of e-commerce sites. The other drawback is that free images may have quite restrictive usage rights. Most will be fine to use on personal websites or blogs. You will have trouble finding free images for online businesses, however.

These are some of my favourite free stock image sites:

Some of the best paid for stock image sites are:

Understanding the Terminology

Some of the terms used in the stock image industry are not very intuitive. It is important to understand what your rights are when purchasing an image or downloading it for free.

The first term used is royalty-free. A royalty free image may either be free or paid for. You pay a signle up front price for the image. The same image can be sold to many people over and over again.

The other term used is Rights-managed. These images tend to be more expensive and you pay a price depending on how many people will be exposed to the image and how long you will be using it for. It is more complicated to acquire a rights-managed image as the fees are often not fixed. You can also add exclusivity into the agreement, so you know that nobody else can use the image while the agreement is in effect. This type of licencing is essential for professional use.

Hiring a Professional

Many photographers specialise in the sort of photography that is required for the web. For example, if you are selling products on your website you need the images to be perfect. For this situation a professional is essential as they will have experience on how to make the products look appealing.

Hiring a professional is the expensive option and you have to be careful about the agreements you make and how much you offer to pay. A contract is essential as you need to make clear the exact terms you require for the images. You also need to decide if you want exclusive use of the images that are taken. In most cases this would be an obvious yes, but you need to make this clear in your contract. Some photgraphers will also require credit if the images are published.

Images You Should Avoid

As well as understanding where you should acquire your images from, it is just as important to know where you should avoid getting your images.

Clipart

Snowman animation from
free-graphics.com

The web used to be full of these cheesy, often animated little graphic icons back in the 1990s. Thankfully now designers are moving away from them. They give an amatuer impression and should be avoided by most. They are suitable for a memo on an intranet site or a funny email but should be kept well away from anything that is viewable by customers.

Hotlinked Images

This is not as much a problem on the Internet as it was but is still a concern for a lot of web developers. You probably know what hot linking is, but if you dont here is a brief recap.

Hotlinking is when you link to an image that is located on a different server from your own website. It is essentially the same as stealing an image from somebody’s website and using it on your own (see the article on Internet plaigirism) with the extra kick in the teeth being that it uses up your bandwidth.

Doing this to somebody else is a very selfish thing to do. It also means that the image could be removed or replaced with a different one at any time. You have no control over the image as it is not on your server. There are also stories all over the web about people replacing hotlinked images with very inapporpriate alternatives in an attempt to enact revenge.

Now you have read this article you should have an idea where to start looking for images for your website. Be sure to check out our article about finding templates, themes and stock images.

Plagiarism on the Web: How To Detect It and Prevent It

corbyboy — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 22:14:21 +0000

Imagine putting your heart and soul into a piece of work, only to see it passed off by somebody else as their own. Many people know what this feels like because it happens all the time on the Internet. The whole cut-and-paste simplicity of copying on the Web makes it irresistible to people who want to build content without having to actually write anything.

Plagirism, as this is known, is sometimes referred to as copying or borrowing somebody else’s work or ideas. This description plays down the seriousness. It is stealing, plain and simple. Just because the content is online in digital format, it doesn’t lessen the offence. If you take a look at The Learning Center, a website that specialises in teaching all about plagiarism you will see the various definitions:

To steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own
To use (another’s production) without crediting the source
to commit literary theft
to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source.

Plagiarism doesn’t just mean word-for-word copying of somebody’s work. Passing off somebody else’s ideas as your own is plagiarism too.

Apart from the fact that somebody has stolen something that you have written, plagiarism can also be damaging for the website that hosted the original content. People are increasingly reliant on search engines to direct people to their content. If Google becomes aware of two copies of an article, how does it know which one to direct people to? Even more devastating to the original author is what happens if the search engine finds the copied version before the original version? Asserting yourself as the original author in this situation can be very tricky indeed.

We will discuss how to deal with plagiarism later on in the article. The first problem we must address is finding which content has been copied in the first place.

Finding Plagiarised Content on the Web

Using Search Engines

The first place people usually go to find out what has been copied from their website is Google. Using a search engine can be quite time intensive as you must search for each page that you want to check. It can be quite useful however as you can spot minor changes to titles and content.

Fortunately, most content scrapers (automatic bots that harvest the internet for content to copy) don’t bother to change the title of the article they are copying. This means that a simple search for the article title will usually return any copies. This is not always the case and some more devious cheats will change certain words. Bear in mind, however, that some words in the title cannot be changed as the title will no longer make sense. Use this to your advantage. Let’s look at an example.

Let’s take this popular article from Articles Base entitled Hairstyles for Round Face Shapes – What Hair Styles Will Suit your Round Face Best. Let’s search Google to try and find if it has been used anywhere. Please note that in this example the article is designed to be reprinted on many different websites. Anybody using the article is free to do so and is doing nothing wrong. We will just use it as an example.

Put the article title in quotation marks and search for it on Google. The quotation marks will ensure all the words are kept in the right order. You can see the results for the search below.

Google search results for our article name

We can then look down the list of results to find who has copied our article.

Using Copyscape

Copyscape (copyscape.com) is a search engine designed specifically to detect copied content on the web. You give it a URL and it will try to match any copies of you page. The advantage of Copyscape is that it doesn’t rely on the title being the same. Bear in mind, however, that any results aren’t always plagiarised copies. Extended quotes will also be flagged up by Copyscape. As long as these quotes are properly attributed to your site, these are acceptable. The image below shows the results when searching for our example URL that we discussed above.

Copyscape screenshot for our article URL

What to do When You Find Copied Content

Contact the Website Owner

The first thing that is worth trying is to simply ask the owner of the website to remove the content (known as sending a “cease and desist” letter). Knowing that he has been caught may be enough to persuade a site owner to remove the stolen content. Make sure you email them or send them a letter rather than simply leaving a comment on their blog or website. Stick to the facts and make the letter very formal. Don’t get personal. Just let them know that they have reproduced your original work without permission. Request they remove it by a deadline set by you. This will work for a small number of sites. If it doesn’t then move on to the next step. Note that some people disagree with contacting somebody who has stolen your content. They say you shouldn’t negotiate with thieves. Personally, I disagree and think that any action that may get the content removed is worth pursuing.

Contact the Website Host

The next step is to contact the web host. You can locate a website’s host by performing a search on Domain Tools. If the site uses subdomain hosting such as WordPress.com or Blogger you will need to contact those sites directly. Hosting companies are usually very keen to avoid any possibility of legal action so most will take your complaint seriously.

International issues mean you will have varied success with contacting a host. In the USA sites are bound by the Digital Milennium Copyright Act but with international hosts the rules vary. Threatening a host with being prosecuted or sued is pointless as you will never be able to follow through with the threat. As we learned when looking at libel and slander on the Internet, international laws for this type of situation simply don’t exist.

As with contacting the website owner directly, simply prepare an email, letter or fax to the host setting out the facts. Again, be formal, polite and stick to the facts. There is a link to sample letters below.

Ask Search Engines to Remove the Content

The goal of most online plagiarism is to attract visitors. It is possible to have stolen content removed from the major search engines by contacting them directly. While this doesn’t remove the offending content from the Web, it will probably reduce the number of visitors to the site and make it much more likely the thief will stop. A lot of the major search engines make it quick and easy to notify them of stolen content. You can look at an extensive list at Plagiarism Today.

As you can see, plagiarism is quite an extensive topic that has caused headaches and heartbreaks for many. Dealing with it can be time consuming and frustrating but persisting will eventually result in having the stolen content removed.

To read more about plagiarism you should definitely take a look at Plagiarism Today. They also have some good cease and desist letters you can edit and send out for yourself. It is definitely worth a look if you are interested in learning more.

Finding Themes, Templates and Stock Images

corbyboy — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:26:42 +0000

Use the tools at your disposal to their best effect

Having a good website design is essential. If a user doesn’t like your website or cannot find what they need, they will leave. It’s a simple as that. Building your own website design from scratch is not for everybody. Likewise, if you use ready made software such as a message board or CMS, you will want to modify the default theme to give your site some individuality. This article looks at some of the best places to find templates for your CMS, blog or website. It also discusses where to find stock photos and clipart.

Website Templates

There are many websites on the Internet offering website templates both for free and paid. Using a ready made template has the advantages of being quick to acquire, visually attractive and semantically accurate. Somebody else has had to worry about producing accuare HTML and CSS and testing the design on different browsers. The main disadvantage is that your website design will not be unique. To solve this problem, many template sites offer you a “unique price.” This will cost you extra but it means that you will be the last person who buys that template. After you have paid, the template is removed from the site and nobody else can purchase it. Unfortunately, you don’t know how many people have used the template before you.

The following list should get you started on finding your template but there are literally hundreds of websites offering tens of thousands of templates at various prices.

Blog Themes

When searching for themes for and ready made software, always ensure that the version you have installed if compatible witht eh theme you are using. Version upgrades will often make changes to the templates or add new features which are not included in older templates. When new versions of software are released, it usually takes a few weeks for suitable themes to become available. Always check for compatibility before you buy or download themes.

WordPress

Moveable Type

Typepad

Everything Typepad: Themes

CMS Templates

Joomla

Mambo

Drupal

PHP-Nuke

Clipart and Stock Photos

In these days of broadband connections, multimedia, graphic rich websites are now commonplace. The best place to source graphics and clipart are from specialised “stock” websites. Generally, there are three types of stock photo.

The first is royalty free. In this context, “free” means that you don’t have to pay every time you use it. You pay for the image once and you can reuse it over and over. It is important to know that these photos will be sold over and over to as many people as the artist wants to.

The second type are licenced images. You pay to use them once, but you have exclusive use for a fixed period of time.

The last type are the free images. While they are free to use, the licence terms usually require you to attribute the source of the image. As these images are free, they are likely to have been used many, many times.

Custom Built Templates

If you want an original, custom-built template for your website you can either build it yourself, or comission somebody to build it for you. While this is the most costly option it comes with the upside that you can choose your own budget and you can be very specific in what design you want. You can choose the time frame for the project and you can monitor the progress of how the template is going along.

While hiring a coder is quite a significant initial outlay, remember that it is a one off fee and you are paying for the services of a professional coder. You can supply them with a rough idea of what you need and they will work with you to produce a more specific design brief. The best websites to use to find a custom coder are ones that allow people to bid on your project. You post a brief outline and a budget and coders will bid for your project. You can check their previous work and ask them question before deciding who to assign your project to.

The best sites to check are:

Optimise Your Pages for Faster Load Time

corbyboy — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:07:27 +0000

Optimise your code so it loads faster.

Optimising your pages is ideally something you should do as you are building your website, not at the end. If you keep these ideas in mind as you develop your website you won’t spend time looking for bottlenecks when your site is complete.

Reduce The Number of Requests

This may sound basic, but simply reducing the number of items on each page will contribute significantly to reducing load time. Think about each item you add before you decide to use it. Is another image really necessary? Can you combine two smaller images into one larger one? If you have more than one javascript or CSS file can you combine them to one? Many of the most popular websites have two or three stylesheets and anything up to ten external javascript files on each page. Combining these into one file would help to increase load time significantly. Your return visitors may have your stylesheets and javascript files saved in their cache, but what about your first time visitors? Why will they return if they had to wait an eternity for the page to load?

Make Javascript And CSS External

While this may sound like it is contradicting the above advice, you should link your javascript and stylesheets rather than include them inline. While this does increase the number of requests, they will be cached and this will make a significant difference in speed when the visitor returns to your website. You will need to experiment to get the balance right for your own site.

Remove All Unnecessary Characters

This includes all unnecessary charcters in your HTML, javascript, CSS, PHP and every other text that you code. You can remove comments, line breaks, extra spaces and tabs. This is particularly effective with javascript and even makes a difference when you are using Gzip. A good tool for compressing javascript is YUI Compressor. Beware that compressing (or “minifying” as it is often called) can sometimes produce bugs in your code. It will make reading source code difficult which is both an advantage and disadvantage. For these reasons, always keep a local, working copy of your work.

Gzip Your Pages

Gzip is a method of compressing text that is sent from your server to the browser. In the same way that zipping a file reduces its download size, gzipping a webpage decreases the amount of data that has to be downloaded. A smaller download size means faster download speeds. Gzip can only be applied to text files, as image files are already compressed.

Gzip with PHP

To apply Gzip compression to your PHP-powered website you simply need to add the following code to each page you wish to compress.

This must be entered before any output is sent to the browser. This is very important. You can’t send out put before you have told PHP to compress the output! This is a very easy way to significantly increase the speed of your webpages. It is up to the browser to implement Gzip correctly so you don’t need to worry about determining whether the browser supports it.

The downside to using Gzip is that it requires more processing power to serve each page. However, this drawback is easy countered by the savings in bandwidth achieved by compressing each page. For this reason, Gzipping as many pages as possible is highly recommended.

Let Users See That A Page Is Loading

One thing that will help your visitors stick around while a page is loading is for them to see that a page is loading. If a web browser knows what a section of a page will look like before the whole page has loaded, it will display it.

Load Stylesheets First

When a browser shows parts of the page as it is loading it is called progressive rendering. The first way to ensure that a page renders progressively is to put the stylesheet in the section. Since the web browser has the stylesheet right at the start it can apply these styles to the page as it loads. If you put the stylesheet at the bottom, the loading of the page is handled differently by Internet Explorer and Firefox. In Internet Explorer a plain white screen is shown until the page has loaded. This means the user has nothing to look at while the page is loading and there is no visual representation that anything is actually hapenning. In Firefox the page is rendered without any styles applied as it loads and then it changes as the stylesheet is loaded. Neither of these is ideal.

Only Use Tables Where Necessary

When content is displayed inside a table it will not be rendered until the entire table is loaded. This means that if your entire page is contained inside a table, nothing will be visible to your visitors until the page is loaded. You should not be using tables for layout anyway.

Basic Layout and Navigation Principles

corbyboy — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:54:40 +0000

Good navigation is essential. Simple as that.

No matter how good a website looks, if your users cannot navigate the site they will leave. It’s as simple as that.

The basic principle is that users must be able to get to where they want to go in as few clicks as possible. In the modern Internet splash screens are out, “click here to enter” is out, “this site is best viewed in Internet Explorer” is out and Flash introduction movies are out (“Skip Intro” is possibly the most clicked on phrase on the whole Internet). User want content. This cannot be emphasised enough, so it will be repeated many times. Users want content. Investing time and money building a wonderful and useful page is no use if visitors cannot navigate to it quickly. Navigation shouldn’t be simple or straightfoward. It must be more than that, it should be obvious.

Give Users What They Want, Not What You Want

An example of bad navigation

The screenshot on the left shows a classic example of how to turn your visitors away. It is from the Chippenham Town Council website. Visitors aren’t here to see flashy text welcoming you to the website. They are here for the content of the website. There are very few websites where a Flash intro works so make sure that using one adds something very significant to your website.

Reinventing the wheel is not necessary when designing your navigation. Creating a new, flashy, original navigation bar that nobody knows how to use is a sure fire way to have your visitors scrambling for the back button. Users know what to expect from navigation so don’t dissappoint them. They are familiar with terms such as “homepage”, “about us”, “view cart” and “contact us” so don’t be afraid to use them.

Use Consistent Navigation

Each page on your website should have a consistent navigation area. Once your users have become accustomed to how to navigate your website, changing this is suicide. Additionally, your logo should be a part of your navigation section. It should be in the same position on every page and it should always link back to your home page.

Remember that not all users enter your website from your home page. These days, search engines bring the majority of traffic for a lot of websites. People often link to specific pages via social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us and Digg. If your website receives a surge of traffic to an “orphaned” page (i.e. a page with no navigation or links to any other pages) you are losing a lot of potential new visitors to your webisite who may have explored more of your site if only you had given them the chance.

Make Links Obvious and Descriptive

Website visitors have become accustomed to knowing what a link looks like. They expect link text to be underlined and a different colour to the rest of the text. You must be very careful if you deviate from this principle as you may confuse people. Users become very frustrated when underlined text appears to be a link, when in fact it isn’t.

“Click here” is, in my opinion, the most abused phrase on the whole Internet. A search on Google for “click here” yields 1.3 billion results. Unscientific I admit, but it certainly illustrates the point. Link text should be short and meaningful. This means it can be understood out of context and, perhaps more importantly, users will understand what is going to happen when they click the link.

Let Users Search For What They Need

For large sites where linking to every page is not possible, a search box is a must. Like your navigation area, the search box should be easy to locate, intuitive to use and present on the same place on every page of the website. A link to a search page is not good enough either. A small text box with a submit button labelled “search” is what you need. For accessibility, pressing return should take you to the results page.

Other Features To Consider

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are links that show where the user is on your website. It allows them to navigate up to different levels of your website and they know the context of the page they are on. Simply put, your visitors know where they are on your website. You can see a breacrumb trail at the top of each page on this website. Ideally a breadcrumb trail should be a the top of each page, but at the bottom may be useful too.

Sitemaps

There are two main forms of sitemaps, those designed for search engines and those designed for human visitors. Sitemaps for search engines list every page on your website that you want crawled by search engine spiders. They are just a guide and do not guarantee inclusion in the search engines. You can find more details on the sitemaps website.

Sitemaps for human visitors are an index of the main sections of your website so people can easily find what they want to on your site. If you have a large website listing every page is not necessary, but on a smaller website you should list all your pages.

Optimise Your Images for Faster Load Time

corbyboy — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:22:58 +0000

On a website, speed is good.

As a competent webmaster, you know that fast loading times are important. Your visitors won’t stick around to read your blog or buy your products if they have to wait too long.

One of the biggest, if not the biggest, bottlenecks in page loading time is waiting for images to load. This guide will show you how to optimise your images for best performance on the web.

Google: A classic example of good minimalist design

A minimalist design can be very effective. Take a look at the image on the left. Google is one of the most popular pages on the Internet and it is also one of the smallest. Remember that the most effective way to optimise an image is to not use it.

Images should only be used when they are necessary. If an image doesn’t add anything to the page then should you really be using it? Remember that not everybody has superfast broadband yet and you need to make your website accessible to everybody.

Use Thumbnails If Possible

Two choices of thumbnails

If you have a page that consists of a large number of images such as a product catalogue or a photo gallery, putting tha full size of each image on the page is not a very sensible solution. Not only will it take an age to load, but the page will look messy and cluttered. Instead, show thumbnail versions of each image and link them to the large version of each picture.

There are two main ways of creating thumbnails: cropping the image or shrinking the image. The following images show the two types of 150×150 pixel thumbnail of a snowboarder.

Crop Out Anything Unneccssary

Taking the example of the snowboarder above, how much of the sky around the snowboarder is necessary? It really depends on what you are trying to show with the image. If you are showing how high the snowboarder is in the air then the sky would be necessary, otherwise cropping as much sky as you can may be the better option.

Use All The Necessary HTML Tags

When including images on a page you should always include the alt, width and height tags. The alt tag is essential as it gives a description of the image for people with images disbaled. The width and height tags are necessary so the browser knows how to place the image in the page while it is downloading.

Compress To The Max

A jpeg image saved with three different compression levels.

Uncompressed files will have a huge filesize and users will be left waiting for images to appear. Many image editors will allow you to change the level of compression when saving your image. It is simply a case of getting the balance between filesize and image quality correct. A more clear image will have a larger filesize.

Try experimenting with different file formats as they each use different compression methods. Jpeg is usually the most suitable format for photographs, whereas you will need to use gif or png if you need transparency.

After cropping the image of the snowboarder, it has been saved in jpeg format with three different levels of compression.