Hi,
I hope someone can help.
I’m having problems with the clarity of page banners on my site:
The banner, a png looks absolutely fine and sharp in Affinity Designer, it looks fine and sharp in RW 6.3.1 in Edit mode. I’m using Foundation 1.4.4.1. In preview mode, it looks very blurry and on the uploaded site it too looks blurry.
Any ideas why?
Thanks in anticipation.
Mike
You may have Preferences>General>Automatically resize larger images selected. If so, turn it off and reimport the image. However, make sure your image isn’t very large first or it will slow down your site. PNG is a great format but can sometimes be rather large compared with a modestly compressed jpg.
Hi peterdankwerts, Automatically resize images isn’t selected.
The image is 800 x 210 and 72 DPI, with a file size of 37Kb, I don’t think the image is either too large or the DPI too low. What I don’t get is that it all looks fine in Edit mode, but not in Preview etc.
Hmm, there used to be an option in RW to ensure that images were unchanged but I don’t think RW6 changes images unless either the preference menytioned above was selected or you choose File>Normalise images, which I’m sure you won’t have done. It’s a puzzle.
One sure way of ensuring that the image is unchanged is to do what I nearly always do – warehouse it. I put them straight onto my server using Transmit.
Hi Peter,
Images weren’t normalised. It’s weird that as I wrote earlier, the image looks great in Edit mode. The same image is used as my email banner (Mac Mail) and that too looks great. It prints out fine as well.
May well take a look at Transmit next week. In the meantime I’ll sit and ponder.
I wonder if the Image area is set to 1000px in the inspector? Or the Max image area set to a bigger dimension than the image itself. Have you tried a slightly higher resolution? Say 96dpi?
Hi mulgravebrad, thanks for the reply. Image Preload is set to images dimensions (800 x 210). The same image is used elsewhere and works absolutely fine. It has been more recently been used on my web site created in Dreamweaver and was fine there too. It’s also used on all my stationary, both electronic and paper versions. Opening the image in Affinity Designer and Acorn, it’s fine there too.
Short of re-creating the image, I’m at a loss.
OK, here’s an update. I have re-created the image - 800 x 200 and 144 DPI in Affinity Designer. Saved it as a .png and added it to a Foundation Image Stack to use as a page banner.
In Edit, the image looks great. In Preview the image looks good too. However, by setting the image’s maximum width to 800, it’s thrown the rest of the page out, especially main body text underneath.
The settings I’ve used for the page are:
One Column Foundation - Flexible
Foundation Image (my banner) - Flexible, Preload 800 x 210, Maximum width as 800.
See screen grab.
What I need is the image to resize and not degrade and to be the same width as the body text underneath when the browser window is made narrower or wider. However at present the image is too small.
What am I missing? This is driving me nuts!! 
So, I think Ive sussed it. Made the image larger, instead of 810x 210, Ive made it 1000 x 210 and I think it works.
The uploaded site can be seen here:my site
Does the site look OK or are there any changes I need to make. Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated. Please bear in mind that I am a RW newbie though.
Looks fine to me, although it loads a bit slowly (at least, on my decrepit computer). Aren’t you afraid of being deluged with spam, leaving your email address in full view?
Hi Peter,
Thanks for your comments, such a relief!! I think the Orbit Slider slows things down quite a bit, but it’s a nice touch.
Regarding my email address, it’s how I get the majority of my business, otherwise I’d have it just as plain text.
This whole banner malarkey has been so frustrating - goodness knows how many hours I’ve spent on that over the past few days?
Is there anything else you think I need to add or change?
Not really. I don’t think it’s the Orbit slider per se that’s the problem, just the need to load what I assume are fairly large pictures. I’m using an Orbit slider myself in a forthcoming site.
But why don’t you just use a contact form?
Good idea about the Contact Form, though I’ve never set one up before Peter.
They’re not too difficult. The Foundation one is quite good. You can set up a security question such as ‘what is the square root of 49?’ which might keep the spambots at bay.
I found the contact form pretty simple. It’s worth using imho.
Cheers
I visited the site and it loaded pretty well (we have top speed cable internet). Images look good, however the timing is fairly slow considering there isn’t a lot to read. At the moment they’re scrolling through at 10 seconds per slide. Did you set it to this Mike? It would be interesting to see it at 6 seconds per slide.
Hi mulgravebrad, The 10000 ms was the default setting. I’ve changed the timing to 5000 ms, which is much beter. Well spotted. Thank you.
Contact form looks great. Do you need to put your ‘info@’ address also? Very professional.
Hi,
Thank you. It was a bit of an epic doing the form, never having done one before.
Do you mean having my email address in the page banner?
Mike