Liven up your website, social media and online ads with GIFs - and what are they anyway?

A GIF (with the file extension, .gif) is basically an image file format that is animated by combining several other images or frames into a single file. This single file is encoded as graphics interchange format (better known as GIF).

GIFs (pronounced Jif) have been around for many years, 30 in fact! Do you remember early websites with annoying scrolling images? Well, these were GIFs too.

GIFs are now hugely popular again and businesses are using them to liven up messages and ads on their websites and social media.

I have recently purchased a new phone (Samsung S8 - love it!) and it has a cool little tool to create GIFs very easily from a video. (See the images on the right). If you use them on your website, ensure you keep the GIFs to only a few seconds to keep the file small, otherwise it will slow down your website too much.

And only use one at a time, otherwise it gets very busy on your page (see the two GIFs I've uploaded, it distracts too much and is a bit annoying.)

Check out https://giphy.com/, a resource website for everything GIF! Lots of downloadable GIFs, how to create them and much more! 
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Till next week, Marijke