It’s funny and eye opening to hear some people talk about images, specifically image types. The two major image types you’ll be using online is GIFs and JPEGs, with PNGs being used slightly. It’s vital that you understand the differences in these image types, and knowing their strengths along with their weaknesses.

A good rule to remember is that if it’s an “animation” you want to use a GIF, if it’s a picture use a JPEG. These are very general and have a couple of meanings. If you’re creating an object of your own and creating things like buttons, horizontal spacers then you’ll want to save an image as a GIF. Also, if you’re creating an image that animates and moves you’ll want to use a GIF as well.

When dealing with JPEGs, you’ll want to remember your ‘picture’ rule. This doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be a photograph, but if you’re dealing with a screenshot or are dealing with something of a picture like quality then JPEG should be your choice. JPEG deals with millions of colors and stores information based on color changes. This means that when dealing with a larger image with larger amounts of shade JPEG is your choice.

Of course there are always hybrid type images that could go either way. Here use the fundamental rules to your best judgement. If there’s any kind of moving animation at all then go gif. If your image is highly color intensive and has a large amount of shade then go JPEG.

Re-direct is a function that I highly recommend against. The only time you really need to provide a re-direct of readers is when you own similar domain names and you want all of them going to a single target page. Barring that I highly recommend against the practice.

If you find yourself using re-direct this is the course of action to do so. It starts with a tag which goes inside your tag. Then type in http-equiv=”refresh” inside your meta tag. This tells the browser to refresh. Next you’ll type content=”(amount of time til refresh);url= (web address). Basically, that tells the browser to refresh and then open the url.

Re-directs are generally used for ads, or if there’s something that needs to be continually updated. Like a football game where the score is always updating. If you keep refreshing it can many times send the wrong signal to a user. Security problems are a main concern if a site refreshes on it’s own.

So be careful out there with your re-directs, and use them sparingly.