What file formats should I provide my content in?

When working on your website, we’ll normally need content from you, such as wording and images. By providing your content to Primary Image in an appropriate format, this will help ensure your content is displayed at its best, plus it’ll help get things into place quicker too.

Here’s our recommend file formats:

Your wording

Please send us your wording in a single Word file (.doc, .docx) or in Rich Text Format (.rtf). For small projects, you can just paste your text directly into an email if that’s easier for you.

Ensure you label each section clearly, so for instance you might say “Home Page”, “About Page”, etc. This will help our designers copy your wording into the right place.

If you’re still making edits to your text, just let us know if you need more time. It’s much easier for us to work with your finalised content. Note that for fixed-price website builds, we normally only include one or two rounds of revisions for free.

We don’t recommend sending your text within PDF files, because it’s not always easy to copy text out of PDFs. For example, sometimes the line breaks get messed up, so we have to manually correct every single line.

Please do not paste images into your Word files (see below).

If you want to include links to other pages or website URLs, just let us know.

Your images

Please send us your images as individual files in JPEG or PNG format.

If you have a lot of images, you may find it easier to create a zip file on your computer.

You can email us messages up to 30MB, as long as your own email provider allows you to send large emails. Or alternatively, use a file sharing service (such as DropBox, WeTransfer, Google Drive, or ge.tt).

It’s often best to send us your images as large as possible, then we’ll resize the files on our end, and we’ll ensure your images are suitable for web use. If you’re intending images to display the full width of a computer screen on your website, we’d recommend sending your images with a minimum width of 1600px.

Please don’t send us images within a Word or PDF file. We have to upload each image to your website as an individual JPEG or PNG file, so we can’t easily do this if you’ve embedded pictures in a Word file (we normally have to screenshot them out again!). Saving pictures into a Word file will reduce the quality of your images too.

When sending your logo to us, we may need it with a transparent background, depending on the exact design of your website. For logo files only, we also accept Adobe Illustrator (.ai or .eps) or Adobe Photoshop (.psd) formats.

If you want any special effects applied to your images, such as colour overlays (e.g. the sample below), please apply them to your JPEG or PNG files before sending them to us.

For fixed-fee website build projects, we don’t include any graphic editing services for free (unless it’s included in our proposal to you), but we’re happy to help on a paid-for basis.

Videos

Your website software can display videos from YouTube or Vimeo.

Once you’ve uploaded your videos to one of those services, all we’ll need is your video URLs. We don’t normally need your YouTube or Vimeo login details.

Social media accounts

If you want us to add icons to your social media accounts, please send us links to your profile pages (e.g. twitter.com/primaryimage).

However, if your project includes embedding social media feeds directly into your website, we’ll normally need your login details. If preferred, you can encrypt your password before emailing it to us.

File downloads

If you want your visitors to download files (e.g. PDF brochures, spreadsheets, etc), we’ll upload your files exactly as provided.

We recommend keeping the file-size as low as possible. For example, a PDF brochure designed for printing could be several megabytes, which may prove slow for visitors to download, so it’s best to optimise your files for web use.

Layout

If you have a particular layout in mind, feel free to send us a PDF file, PSD file, or a scanned / photographed sketch. Alternatively, if you’ve seen an existing website that you like, feel free to share a link with us too!

Do consider that layouts vary for different screen sizes, especially for mobiles, so we’ll take this into consideration when creating your webpages. Layouts are normally fluid, so they adapt to different screen sizes.

We will only use your mockup file(s) for reference purposes, so we don’t extract any images out of these files. To help preserve the quality of your images, please send us JPEG or PNG files for each individual image.

What if I can’t provide my content to you in the recommended formats above?

As long as we can open your file type (i.e. we have the right software to load the file), we’ll attempt to use it. If your image quality is going to be significantly deteriorated, we’ll let you know, so you can try to provide an alternative.

If we’re working on an per-hour basis, bear in mind if you send over your files in our recommended formats, this will shorten the amount of time we’ll need to invoice for.

Please note that if we’re carrying out your project on a fixed-fee basis, our quote will assume you can provide your content in the formats mentioned above. We reserve the right to charge for any additional time it takes us if you’re not providing content in our recommended formats.

in Web Design
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