Setup Guide V1 (last updated January 4th, 2007)

Designed for the Gen7 Series Templates and Modules

Welcome to Image Editing 101: Learning to work with images using Macromedia Fireworks 8:

You won't need any special software to 'replace' the images in your website, it's just a matter of drag and drop really. But, you will need additional 'image editing' software to create your replacement images. There are three very important things to consider when replacing images in your template:

• file dimensions (height and width of new images)

• file size (size in kilobytes, to large an image will result in slow load times)

• file name (replacement images must be named exactly the same as the image they are replacing)

This is one of the more advanced updates you may tackle when building your web site. The biggest challenge with replacing the images in your website is finding a suitable high quality replacement image, and sizing it correctly. There are two common scenarios that we deal with.

• Replacement images taken with a digital camera

• Replacement images purchased from an online photo source

In each scenario, the images will be much larger than the images used in the template, and will need to be resized, and then renamed. There is one further scenario when replacing images, when we resize an image; we usually crop it to some degree meaning we remove parts of the image background so the ‘focal point’ of the image, say a person’s face, is centered in the image, or aligned to the ‘display’ area of the web page. It may sound a bit technical but we do have a detailed video that will explain this in greater detail with tips on how to make your images work for your template.

The video instructions demonstrate how to use Macromedia Fireworks 8 to work with replacement images. You can use any graphic program you like, but I prefer to work with Fireworks 8, as this program is specifically designed to create graphics for web sites, and the tools are a bit more user friendly than it’s beefier (now cousin?) Adobe Photoshop.

You can download Fireworks 8, for a 30-day free trial.

DOWNLOAD Fireworks 8 free for 30 days!

If you need help with replacing the images in your website, you can contact our design team and we'll be glad to help.