Finding, creating and managing assets
What you’ll learn
- How to find the best assets (pictures, videos, etc.) for your website
- Practical tips for creating assets, without needing to be a visual designer
- Tips for organizing and making the most of your assets
The importance of assets on your website
In an increasingly visual world, ensuring your website or other web presence has high quality visuals is key to engaging your readers and audience. And on top of having the right assets, you’ll want to make sure they load quickly and are appropriately sized for your pages.
Great visual assets can ensure your audience keeps coming back for more and can easily understand your message.
Finding and using visuals that already exist
It’s often easier to build off of someone’s existing work, assuming you have their permission than create your own visuals from scratch. Luckily there are websites and communities designed just for this purpose. An example is Unsplash- “The internet’s source of freely-usable images”. The Google for Creators team spoke with Mikeal Cho, CEO and co-founder of Unsplash about their journey and how they have helped everyone, “from independent bloggers to large publishers, and small businesses to Fortune 500 companies”. While there are a few rules, Unsplash’s photos are made to be downloaded and used for free for commercial and non-commercial purposes.
There are several popular sources for visual images on the web, including Unsplash. Check them out for easy access to assets that can be used in your content.
Creating assets if you can’t find the right one
Sometimes you aren’t able to find just the right asset for what you’re trying to convey. In this case, there are some easily available tools online that allow you to create assets. If you’re looking to create or edit visual content, you might consider GIMP or Canva, free image editors that works across various platforms.
Otherwise, you consider taking pictures yourself! With high quality camera phones you can easily take photos to support the content in your niche.
Making sure your assets load quickly and are high quality
Once you have the right visual assets, you want to ensure that they load quickly and are sized correctly. Often photos taken on our phones or from high quality sources are too big for a typical website post or Web Story.
Images can be scaled down so they load quickly while still retaining most of their quality. A great open source tool to do this is Sqoosh- An open source drag-and-drop tool for compressing images. You can read more about making sure your images strike the right balance of quality and compression here.
Use image compression tools like Sqoosh to make sure they are small enough to load quickly on mobile devices, but still high quality and not blurry or pixelated.
Assets for Web Stories
If you’re using Web Stories, visual assets are critical to get right since every page requires some sort of video or image element. You can see more on how to setup your assets for Web Stories here and converting videos here:
Managing Assets
Over time you’ll likely end up with a large amount of assets for your site or other web presence. This is why it’s important to start organizing any files and assets with a system from the beginning. We suggest finding a common taxonomy like “description_date_version.file type” or whatever works for your site. That way you can easily find files and assets in the future if you ever need to look up something.
