their shopfront, their staff or their fleet of delivery vans as a JPEG or a PNG and be asked 

to pay no more than an appropriate filestorage fee. The dimensions of an image on the 

web are far less relevant than in the print edition, where every column inch counts. The 

print edition does allow for basic colours these days, but only for text and simple blocks. 

A  total of four businesses have full colour photographs in the 2004 print edition of the 

Golden  Pages  for  the  01  area  and  these  necessitate  special  glossy  pages.  A  well 

compressed  640*480  pixel  JPEG  photograph  weighs  in  at  no  more  than  45  kilobytes, 

which  takes  about  eight  seconds  to  download  on  a  56  Kb/s  internet  connection.  While 

larger companies will undoubtedly still pay professional graphic designers to create their 

picture ads, an online service at least gives smaller vendors the opportunity to present a 

better image at an affordable price. 

An  online  picture,  or  at  least  the  hyperlink  to  it,  can  also  carry  some  useful  metadata. 

This  metadata  can  be  best  used  to  summarise  the  picture.  Bob`s  Courier  Service  may 

have a particularly eye catching picture ad featuring a white van. The nearest an online 

service can offer as far as the visual mnemonic for returning customers described above 

is to give the customer the option to search for a  white van , returning the business or 

businesses  with  ads  featuring  a  white  van.  Such  a  feature  may  even  be  useful  from  an 

accessibility  standpoint  by  giving  a  visually  impaired  user  some  way  of  discriminating 

between different advertisers` offerings. 

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