ATTENTION: The information presented in this article is personal opinions derived from professional experience of the author who does not have any responsibility on any results that may outcome of these suggestions / ideas / information.

Graphics on your website
Author: Emmanouil Filippou
Date: 17/7/2008

Graphics / Photos / Animations make your website more impressive and in many cases more functional. They bring the visitor closer to you, closer to the subject of your website.

You will use Graphical elements in your website:

• If you want to impress the visitor you will use graphics, photos, animations…
• If you want to show what you are selling to the visitor you need to use graphics and photos
• In any case, graphics will be able to assist the visitor and will bring him in a state of mind desired.

The graphical environment / interface has become more and more necessary as the Internet progresses and the technology improves.

Graphics / Photos / Animations have a some drawbacks though, if not used wisely, they may affect the speed of loading of your pages, which means that some visitors will not be able to view them, while others will leave due to slow response… and personally I think this percentage is very large.

That’s because they may be very large in size which means that the larger in size, the slower response times in loading. No matter how fast the vistor’s connection speed is, the heavy website will always be slower than the light one.
In addition, they will use most of the bandwidth available on your server, which in effect may cost more to maintain the website.

Another problem is that the search engines do not index text that may be contained within a photo, graphics button, flash clip… this means that it loses in placing if your website contains much text within graphics.

The graphical environment requires most of the time in development for most static webpages, so it costs more to implement. It is also in many cases very time consuming to change the graphical environment / look / interface of a graphical website.

The best way to handle these problems are:

• Careful image sizing to exact dimensions to be shown, large compressions for jpg images, smart design that uses lightweight graphics.
• Smart design to somehow incorporate in the webpages both the text and the graphical text so it doesn’t lose from search engine placing
• Smart and minimalistic designs will bring the cost down while providing at the same time the desired result.

Graphics should be handled by professionals and wherever possible, internet website specialized professionals, because they are one of the most important elements of a successful website.

© Copyright 2008 Filippou Emmanouil:
No part or the whole of the above article may be quoted or reproduced or copied or re-distributed or printed without the written authorisation of Filippou Emmanouil