Our resident Picture Cop has finally been put on patrol; he's on the beat people! Move aside! Coming through! Plenty to see here!

No we haven't gone crazy; we've had the idea for a time now. They say that "necessity is the mother of all invention", and it's true. I've seen nearly all our clients' eyes widen and generally look bewildered whenever I mentioned the need to optimise any images they put on their website. Otherwise they will be slow to download on a web page if they're too big in size and format, leaving visitors waiting and we can't have that! It isn't mega essential now that most people have broadband but it's always nice to have a speedy website.

So fear no more, for your convenience as valued clients, we have spent weeks building Picture Cop (for short), our cyber policeman, and he has been issued his mission statement "To go where no Cop has been before; to speed up all our clients' websites by optimising all the pictures he can find;". As you read this he is probably patrolling all your websites and optimising all the images he can find to make sure they're optimised for your visitors.

By default Picture Cop will patrol all your websites. He will only manipulate JPG files, which is the most common format. If you want to use GIFs and PNGs etc, you still can but they won't be optimised at this time. The integrity of your pictures will remain intact, but they'll be faster to download when your visitors come to visit.

You can opt out of having your website patrolled completely if you wish to by emailing Picture Cop on info@whalleywebsites.co.uk.

If you like the convenience of this service for your images, but you have a specific picture that you would like to not be optimised, (there are sometimes reasons why you would want this), then you can either place the phrase 'NoPatrol' in the filename of the picture (eg. PictureOfMyRat-NoPatrol.jpg) or you can place the picture(s) into a folder called 'NoPatrol' and all of those pictures in that folder will be ignored by Picture Cop.

I hope this is clear what is happening, if you have any questions for Picture Cop - he's a bit busy obviously, but if you email me I can answer on his behalf.

thanks for reading