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Putting your photos on the web

So how do you put a Smart Photo on your website? It's easy. Within the Smart Photo editor there's a Save and Publish button. Clicking that will present you with a small snippet of HTML. All you need to do is use this HTML on your website and the photo will appear when you preview or publish the page. You do not have to download any images to your hard disc or upload them again to your web server.

Pretty much every web authoring tool allows you to embed HTML into your website.

Microsoft FrontPage
One of the most popular web authoring tools around, to add a module to your web page, place the cursor where you want the Smart Photo to go and select the Insert Menu, then Advanced and HTML. You get a small text box in which you paste the HTML snippet, and that's it. You may want to select the View-->Reveal Tags option to see where the modules are. You can preview the page, as usual, by selecting the Preview tab at the bottom of the screen.

For other web authoring software refer to the instructions for the product. This webpage has instructions for a range of other web authoring tools: http://help.xaraonline.com/insert.htm

If you made a thumbnail smart photo module then you can click it to see it open a new window with the large photo.

You can now take advantage of some of the other unique Smart Photo features such as the ability to alter or update your photo from anywhere.

Remote update

Because the original Smart Photo resides on Xara Online servers, and there is just a reference from your web page to the photo, it's possible to edit, or change the photo altogether, without touching your website HTML. What this means is that you do not have to use your web authoring tool, or alter the HTML or upload new HTML in order to change your photo (this same advantage applies to all Modules).

In order to change the photo once it's on the web, simply go to www.xaraonline.com and enter your username (your email address) and password and you can then access all your photos and edit them. (This does not apply to web authoring systems that directly include Modules). Any that are already published on web pages can be updated and you just need to refresh the web page with them on to see the new picture.

Instant Edit

Alternatively there is a short-cut that allows you to edit the photo directly from your website. Immediately below every smart photo is a small invisible 'edit' region. Moving the mouse pointer over this region and pressing the Ctrl key down and clicking will take you directly to the editor for this photo (after asking for your username and password), where you can alter the picture. Clicking Save & Publish will now update the photo on your website. Certainly this is a lot easier than editing your web page HTML, uploading or re-publishing your HTML to your servers etc.

Hold your mouse pointer under the module to see the message

Performance

Some people ask whether having the photo served from a different web server slows down their website. The answer is no, it usually makes no difference. In some situations it can even improve the performance of your website. Firstly remember that all photos on all websites have to be fetched from the actual web page. It's very common that content, photos and graphics come from a variety of different servers and different addresses - that's the power of the web. Not only do different web pages come from anywhere in the world, but different parts of a single web page can also come from different servers, and those servers can be anywhere.

The Xara Online servers are located directly on the Internet backbone and major network operation centres around the world. This means the highest performance and typically better than many ISP or company servers that are on the end of a leased line. So while you may think you get access to your website quickly - that's not always how other people see it. So it's possible that if you're hosting your web page with an ISP that does not offer fast global access, or one that's maxed out (popular community hosting websites can be very slow at certain times of the day), then in these situations it's quite likely that visitors will see the photos on your website faster from the Xara Online servers than from your ISP servers.

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