Posted on March 29th, 2010Creating a website without images is unheard of in today’s day and age, especially if you are trying to visually appealing site that will attract visitors. Having a site with high quality images and other multimedia files is absolutely essential if you’re trying to keep visitors at your site for an extended period of time. Aside from putting interactive images and videos on your site, you may also want to amend the theme of your website and make some decorative site changes. The problem that most people have is that they don’t know how to host images online.
The quick and easy solution to hosting your images would be to use a free image hosting service like photobucket, and then linking to your images within the internal structure of your site. However, this may not be a very reliable solution since the images are not hosted on your web server. If you want to have your images load quickly, and not have to worry about third party servers losing your images, then you will need to host the images on your own web server using an FTP client.
What is an FTP Client?
An FTP client is a program that lets you transfer information from your computer’s hard drive to your website. This lets you easily make adjustments to your sites files and upload many files at once to your site. FTP clients make it easy for you to interact with your web server and make any kind of adjustments you want to your website.
How to Host Images on the Web Server
Hosting images on your web server is as easy as uploading a normal file to your site, however you will need to know how to link to your image once you have uploaded it to your site. The way you link to the image is going to depend upon what the image is used for. If you want the image to be embedded on a specific page, then you will need to add an image source tag to your html page. If you are using WordPress then you will need to embed it in your post using the options in the WordPress WYSIWYG editor. If you want the image to be a part of your site’s background then you will need to add some code to the CSS style sheet of your site so that the site will call back to the image file when your background loads.
Creating Image Directories
In some cases you may need to create a new directory to host your image in. This is especially useful if you want to keep the images well organized in a specific order. You may also want to do this if you are hosting images that you want to keep hidden, such as private images that are accessible only to a member section of your website. In this case you could create an image directory and then assign specific file permissions to that directory.
Conclusion
Hosting images on your website is a far more reliable and plausible solution than hosting the images on a free third party server. If you decide to host on a third party server then you are taking the risk of losing your images permanently, having them disappear from your site temporarily, or having them load slowly for your visitors.