Dachshund - The dachshund is a long dog, also called a 'sausage dog' because of its shape. Use this Dogtype if you have one of those old sites that has everything on site on one looooong single page. This page will carry on scrolling down forever as it loads. You know ones I mean. Scroll much further and you will probably find yourself in Australia. (Of course, if you live in Australia, then you will probably end up scrolling down to England. Life can be tough sometimes, can't it?) When I come across one of these sites I start to get really jittery as I watch scrollbar shrink down to about one millimeter wide. My mouse is simply not engineered to be able to get hold of something that small!

Great Dane - Restricted Dogtype for websites in Denmark (near Norway, Europe). This Dogtype is expected to be of little significance to most webmasters in rest of world.

Unfortunately none of current versions of IE are compatible with any of these new Dogtypes (except Mutt/Mongrel). So IE will render your pages in Quirks mode whether you use them or not. Other browsers handle Dogtypes correctly and it is anticipated that IE7 will do so too.

Web developers believe that if Dogtype declaration is included in major search engine listings it will be a big help to Web users everywhere. Surfers will be warned in advance whether a site uses lots of Flash, scripts or animations and can then decide whether or not to click on a link.

The above Dogtypes will all have a Strict and a Transitional version. The Transitional Dogtypes all allow for use of deprecated squeaky pet toys. Unfortunately though, there are no plans for any of new Dogtypes to have a Frameset version.

You can use same technique if photographing someone with an object, such as an award. Get them to hold it up against their face, not on their chest.

When using viewfinder or preview screen really work hard to fill every pixel, moving people around if need be.

Once you have shot there is a lot you can do to improve it. I have yet to see any image straight out of a digital camera that couldn’t be enhanced.

First, make sure you are viewing image on type of monitor that everyone else in organisation is going to use. If using a Macintosh, change gamma setting from 1.8 to 2.2 (the Windows standard). Images displayed on a PC are inherently more contrasty than they look on a Mac if you don’t.

In Photoshop, adjust levels using histogram as a guide. This is better than using brightness and contrast controls. Sometimes it can help to boost saturation by +10 too, depending upon what camera you use.

Then crop image to show what you want, bearing in mind how it will be used on screen. Once cropped, resize image down to 250 pixels or whatever you normally use. If you resize and then crop you will end up with something totally wrong size!

The final step is to apply some Unsharp Masking to image to put back some of definition lost through resizing. It is amazing how many people don’t do this. Typical settings in Photoshop are Amount: 30-100%, Radius 1.5 pixels and Threshold 5-7 levels.

Don’t overdo sharpening. If it looks too gritty, cut Amount down by half.

Finally, save as a JPEG file (not a GIF, which only uses 256 colors, instead of JPEG’s 16.7 million), choosing an appropriate level of compression. When all internet connections were via a modem it was important to get file size incredibly small, but with most intranets you can afford to make them a little bigger.

Using “Save for Web option” you can play with “Quality” control to get a good balance between file size and image quality. You should be able to get a 250 x 200 pixel image down to around 10k with no sign of degradation or artefacts – these are strange squiggles you see in over-compressed images.

Voila! You now have an image that is well composed, tightly cropped, optimized, sharpened and ready for use.