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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