Various studies have shown that a website (or a publication) with simply with graphics and/or images elicits much more response than those that present the same information completely as text. Partly as a result, over the last few months, I have been incorporating at least one image into most postings and/or daily quotes on the Lars Toomre personal website. By going back each day and enhancing some additional prior posts, the personal website can now publically display to the visitor over five hundred different images.

Each of these images is stored in a source file, generally of the jpeg format variety. Collectively, the small sample of five hundred or so image files has quite a variety of heights, widths, pixel densities and a wide variation of other parameters. The addition of other images in the .png of .gif formats would add to the variety of parameters that must be dealt with.All of these files and their various parameters must be adjusted in some manner if a consistent presentation to the user is to be achieved. It is quite a challenge!

The seamless presentation of both text and image on a website using the Drupal content management system ("CMS") has been just a bit daunting. Hence, although I was aware of the appeal to the end-user, until recently I have held off putting much effort into this graphic image area until more stable and well-engineered solutions began to gain wider use.

Like much of the world-wide web itself, Drupal continues to evolve from a text-center world to one that includes text, images, audio and other rich multi-media files like video. The forthcoming Drupal 7 release will make dealing with the many different files that contain audio, images and video much easier and the challenging issues of how they should be served to the user who no longer just accesses the content via a computer web browser. Even today, a surprising number of visitors to the Lars Toomre personal website are using mobile devices and that percentage is likely to increase in the coming months.

As Drupal has evolved over the last eight years or so, developers of contributed modules have tackled various presentation or behavior challenges in "extensions" to the Drupal core. Some of these modules have tackled a particular problem in one way, while another developer might approach the same problem from a slightly different angle. Generally, one of these solutions becomes more frequently used (and further enhanced) by other developers. Ahead of major releases, those modules that become very frequently used (such as the views module) are incorporated into the core modules so that functionality is supported and made available to the whole Drupal community.

Adding stable and consistent support for multi-media files to a system like Drupal requires considerable effort. There are numerous decisions one must make about consistency of presentation and how the reference files should for instance be scaled or cropped. Say for instance, a web developer wants to present a thumbnail view of the reference image on a summary page and a scaled view on a more detailed page describing a particular vocabulary term. Both are different in size at minimum from the reference image.

At this point, it is possible to do many of the desired calculations and file operations to create derived image(s) from a reference image. However, each operation does take time, likely slowing down the presentation to the user of a dynamic page that contains several images. Ah, one thinks… "Do the calculations and create the derived images when the reference image is added!" Well, that now involves the creation of n times as many files that must be automatically maintained, updated and/or deleted as possible changes are made to the reference image. One can understand why this consistent image presentation issue quickly blossoms into a number of tough engineering challenges.

Lars Toomre uses his personal website as a sandbox for using and testing out both other contributed Drupal modules (and themes) and those Lars and the Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM") team have developed for their own use. Sometimes, there is a real "gotcha" where some unexpected behavior is observed. At such times, it is fine to have the personal website perform less than optimally. Such is not the case for production websites like the business website for TCM (www.toomre.com). Hence, we have been much slower to introduce new features to production sites so they hopefully remain in a consistently stable, but nonetheless ever-evolving state.

Adding an image and its associated information as content to a website takes more time. As a small business owner, there are never seems to be enough time in a week. Should what time that is devoted to the company website be dedicated to creating more original content, adding multi-media content or otherwise enhancing the website? In short, what is the risk/reward trade-off with time spent on adding visuals? Will such work result in more visitors and ideally paying customers? I certainly did not want to start something and then simply stop because it was producing no results.

Hence, I have been quite interested to see how this "portfolio" of five hundred or so images becomes integrated with the various search engines and what search referral traffic arises as a result. I not yet devoted much time to enhancing what is known as a sitemap.xml file to incorporate this additional multi-media data. What this file now contains basically is a list of the website urls and the last time that content was changed. The various search engines and other crawlers then look in this file for what is stated to be publically available to the internet community. Some of the content contains image references; others do not. Some of this image data is tagged; other images have little more than a descriptive file name.

How would the various search engines approach this visual categorization issue? Given the slowness with which images are categorized by say Google, I have been waiting to draw some initial conclusions. The first pass at a sample summary of what Google has available for image search has been moved to the post Sample Summary of Google Image Search Results. I will write more about this data in future posts.