Good evening Brad or Jessica,

I attached a file that I want to put on my homepage but am having a pixel problem with this one! I have played with this file and changed it in so many ways and still when I load it on the homepage it is unreadable. Any ideas what I need to do to make this work. I used Microsoft Publisher and never had problems like this before.

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Dawn

Ah, I'm glad you raised this, because it's actually something that gets asked rather infrequently yet is very important.

Many people think the web is a high resolution medium. It's really not. Web graphics are typically created at only 72 dots per inch. Compare that to a typical printout on a sheet of paper, which would usually contain 300 dots per inch or higher. Some magazines are thousands of dots per inch.

As a result of the web being a low resolution medium, text needs to be large enough to be readable (i.e. since you only have 72 dots per inch to work with, you need text for the web that's at least 10 pixels or so). Anything smaller than that starts becoming hard or impossible to read. With higher resolution mediums text can be much smaller and remain readable.

Bottom line, the problem you have here is you have a very large image that has very small text to begin with. So now you're trying to put it on your home page, which means you've got to significantly shrink the image. When that happens the text becomes impossible to read.

Our system assumes that if you're uploading an image to the home page that you're trying to squeeze it into the left hand column, which doesn't really have much room. So it auto resizes to that size. If that's what you're trying to do, you'd have to redesign the graphic itself with larger text (probably at least twice as large).

Now, it's not all bad news for you here if you want to keep this original graphic just like it is. In your case you have plenty of content that goes on past your right hand modules, so you could put it somewhere at the bottom of the page so it's below the right hand modules. The problem is our system is going to auto resize it because you're uploading it while editing your home page, which isn't what you want, so here's how you can basically trick our system:

1) Go into edit mode for any of your sub pages instead of your home page.
2) Click the yellow image icon and upload your file there. Because you're doing it there, the system will allow images up to 646 pixels, and yours happens to be 636, just shy of the sub page limit.
3) Now return to your home page, make sure you click somewhere near the bottom of your page after the right hand modules, then click the yellow image icon and select your save.gif graphic. Insert it.

You now have the full sized image on your home page. Again, just make sure this image does not start before the right modules end. Here's one more little trick:

Some of the right hand modules are different sizes every day, like Birthday, This Day In History, etc. If you want to ensure your image always begins after those modules end, just put this in the source code just before your image:

This will make your image start when the right modules end no matter how short or long those modules are every day.

Wow Brad, thanks!
That's great information for all of us.
Retha