Graphics, images and media are a very important part of any web design. They make the site more appealing, pleasing to the eye and therefore popular. It is likely that the images you use give your visitors the first real idea of the products or service you sell. The quality and placement of your images on the page is essential in order for it to look attractive to the viewer. A quick glance at any of your favourite websites should show you how images are used within a page. The more popular and readable the site, the better the image quality and placement will be.

By having a website you are either wanting to sell something, promote something or just talk. Whatever its purpose the site has to be easy to read and navigable. Writers refer to it as white space. An area between text to break the copy into easily digestible chunks. Web images are the internet version of white space. Careful placement will break up a page with something much more interesting than white space. If the image is relevant to the text it is placed near then it gives added weight to the text, or clarification if any were needed.

The standard format for web images are either JPEG or GIF as they can be optimized for the web better than the others. This means they can load quicker which improves the overall response of the site. Because of this JPEGs are mainly used for photographic images and GIF is for other graphics and images. Not everybody has broadband so an eye has to be kept on the page weight and loading times on lower bandwidth connections. If a page takes too long then your visitor is going to get bored very quickly. You have three seconds to capture a visitors attention, so if you page takes longer than that to load, you’re in trouble!

Aside from customer experience, any image intensive website is going use its bandwidth allocation quite quickly unless the pages are optimized. Most hosting options have bandwidth limits included in the price. If you go over that it can become an expensive business, so it pays to keep an eye on it.

There are free tools on the internet that will optimize your images for free if you don’t have a graphics program that can do it. A word of caution though, JPEG format is lossy, so every time you redo a picture it loses a bit of quality. It is advisable to keep the image in its native format and only convert it to JPEG once complete.

Pictures can paint a thousand words and the right images, in the right places can enhance the readability of your site no end. Careful thought must be given to these images so they don’t cost you more than they earn. Poor quality, badly placed or slow loading images are going to put people off your site rather than bring them back.

Pretty Pictures is a post from: Fort Myers Web Design