If you are reading this, that means that you are interested in submitting an article for the Australian Moth web site. The following is some instructions to streamline line web authoring and help reduce Rohan's time that he spends updating the web site.

Step 1 - Article Generation
Write up your article in Microsoft Word, Notepad or WordPad. Ensure that it is has the correct punctuation and spelling (this includes capital letters at the start of sentences). Just use the same font (arial or times new roman is fine) throughout the entire article and minimise the use of bolding, UPPERCASE, underlining and different font sizes as this only makes it difficult to read and confuses readers. If you are using a table in your document, make it as simple as possible.

Step 2 - Image Referencing
If pictures are to be included in the article, do not insert the picture into the Word document. Instead make reference to the file name, for example (insert 'santa_moth.jpg' here) of where you would like the image to go.

Step 3.1 - Image Editing
To start off with, you will need an image editor like Photoshop or Fireworks. If you don't have one, then you probably can't do this. If you do have one, please read on to save us a lot of time. But if you have any troubles with this step, don't worry about it, go to Step 3.2.

Firstly you will need to crop any of the outside of the image that doesn't matter if it is not there. Just trim the image so that the main focus of the photo is all that you can see. Next, you will need to adjust the actual image size and resolution. Firsly adjust the resolution to about 75 DPI and then adjust your image size somewhere between 300 to 800 pixles in width (height is not so important) depending on the quality of the photo. If you know how to adjust colour levels of an image too, this is the time to do this. Just use the 'auto levels' function in all good image editors to enhance the color and make it easier to see on a monitor. Feel free to sharpen the image too if you know how to do this. All this should take around 2 minutes with a bit of practise.

Your image should now be between 30-80Kb in JPEG format, but you can sqeeze it down a bit more (ideally 10-20Kb) by reducing the quality of the JPEG output down to about 70%.

Step 3.2 - File Naming
Output image file names should also all be in lower case with no spaces, ie 'black_rock_moth.jpg' (you can use underscore _ for a space). Web browers don't like spaces in file names and upper casing files confuses Windows and Unix computers. You have now created the perfect image for the web and saved us a lot of time.

Step 3.3 - Thumbnail Images
If you would like to have a thumbnail image that links to a larger image (that opens in a new page or something), thumbnails can be about 150-200 pixles in width/height and main images can be up to 800 pixles in width. Use the same file name for both images, but put a '_t' at the end of the thumbnail to indicate that it is a thumbnail, for example 'reaching_t.jpg' for the thumbnail and 'reaching.jpg' for the main image.

Step 4 - Submission
Once you have completed your article, email all the files you want published together to Australian Moth Web Master. The article will be published within the next few days (depending on the amount of work back logged though).

Step 5 - Thank You
This step is the final step and it is where we say a BIG thanks for promoting and contributing to the International Moth Class Association of Australia.