Images

 

Pictures paint a thousand words (or so it is often said). But whilst pictures are important for getting your message across., they must be relevant to your site message.

 

Images are hungry resources that can often take time to load - particularly on graphic rich pages. For this reason, its better to limit your display of pictures to what is essential for any particular page.

 

Images fall into several categories. Firstly, there are page graphic elements such as lines, borders, boxes and artistic text. These elements usually form the core design of your pages and influence the whole look and feel of your site.

 

The second category, is illustrations and photographs. These help to tell your story and add reinforcement to the written words on your pages. These type of images should be chosen with care to ensure they really do reinforce the message.

 

The third category is animations - we’ve covered the use of animations in another article, so no need to go into this subject again here.

 

And finally, there are the “Showcase” pictures. These are usually presented in two formats. The first is the gallery format (photographers and artists like to use galleries to showcase their portfolios). The second format is the Product Showcase which presents a picture of a product with a small gallery of additional product pictures that people can click on to see a larger view. This format is often used in e-commerce sites to show various product colour options etc.

This is a typical showcase format used for displaying images. It’s a compact method of showing images without cluttering your pages.

Important Image Rules

 

All your images, no matter how they are to be displayed, must be of the highest quality to begin with. Although many web designers will automatically optimise your images, be sure to specify that you want your images fully optimised for fast web viewing.

 

Don’t have your images display too large on the page (unless there is a good reason for doing so). Smaller images look good for illustrating key points of your text. They can be easily set within your text and help to break-up large articles into more visually appealing chunks.

 

Try and select images that work well with your site’s overall colour scheme. As a general guide, colour images usually look brighter and crisper against a darker background. If your pages are to be predominately light colours, consider having your pictures framed in a dark contrasting colour

 

 

Click on thumbnails to see a larger view