All photos should be sent in JPEG format, high resolution, much larger than the target size. It is in general best if we have fairly high resolution photo files (jpeg) to work from. It is usually easier start with a large photo then reduce its size, and usually gives better results in terms of image quality.
For Mac Users, make sure that you have correctly set your Gamma settings for Windows in your image processing program (Photoshop, for example).
Currently about 97% of all internet users are on Windows PC's, so you want to make sure that they will see what you want them to see.
If this is not done, photos that look really good on the Mac will look really dark on a PC. If you don't know how to do this, we can help you with those settings.
There is no way to make a small, low resolution image display decently when expanded to a large or high resolution one.
All other graphics (line art, page graphics and so on) should be sent in their original working format, such as Photoshop (.psd) or Fireworks (.png) so that we can work on the files if we need to. If your graphics use a special font, also include that font with the file. We can help you do this if you aren't familiar with the procedure.
There are several reasons for this. Having the original version gives us a good working copy, and makes future changes much easier to do. If we are just making you a website, we will give you all of our original image files when we deliver the final version of the site to you.
Please do not try to optimize your images for us. There is no way we can recover optimized or compressed images. Simply follow the above rules, and let us take care of the rest and your images will look great, will load fast, and will be put up at very little cost, since most of the processing we do is automated.
Please use an FTP program to transfer multimedia files to us. Our email will not accept large attachments, and you will find that it is a very easy procedure once you get used to it.
We prefer to process and create our own RealAudio, Windows Media, and Quicktime files from the original high resolution audio files (formats such as .wav). In general it's easier for us to do it for you. We can create RealMedia, Quicktime, MP3, and WindowsMedia formatted compressed files for live streaming over the internet.
Editing of audio/video files is very time consuming, and requires a great deal of specialized software to do properly.
If editing is required, we can set you up with a video or audio professional who will be happy to help you with that side of things. We can do some basic editing tasks if required.
Creating a successful streaming video for the web is somewhat complicated. We would prefer to generate your files for you from a high resolution original provided by you. Please do not send anything in the MPEG format, it is difficult for us to reprocess it into other streaming video types, like RealMedia, Quicktime, or Windows Media.
AVI is a fairly standard format, and easy to work with, although the file sizes tend to get big.
Due to the large size of audio and video files, these must be sent either with an FTP program, or by CD-ROM. The size of the file will determine which method should be used, but as a general rule, anything over about 200 megaBytes (200 mB) should probably be sent by mail.