When it comes to designing and creating a website, it is crucial to take full advantage of using the images. As far as web design is concerned, it has become a trend a trend, where using of graphics powerfully convey messages that reinforces concepts and product sales that we promote.
These elements are very essential and crucial part of visual communication in tackling web design. However, misuse of images is something we can find easily. We see a lot of images, pictures, that doesn’t relate to the topic covered on website and not fits in the design as well as ideas that do not quite close. Sometimes, such excessive use of pictures and lack of text on site confuses the users.
Therefore, “it is highly important, that the text associated with a picture message should be served to clarify and define the idea we want to offer to the user.”
When designing and creating a website, an image is an important aspect and is the perfect hook to the eye when doing a tour of a page. It is always much easier to alert the user with an image that is shocking, funny, transgressive… But the meanings of an image can be various and very different, so if we just simply include an image, it will diffuse and lose the attention that we have captured in the user at first.
Hence, it is necessary that an accompanying text is served with the image to clear the vision about the image. The text will adopt the specific meaning within the possibilities that can offer us, at first glance, the image corresponding to the message you want to convey. This will further increase the users ability to remember what we wanted to communicate.
This technique is very much utilized in advertising. It uses an image that captures the users attention in the first instance, awakens their curiosity, makes them to read it at least to clear the question that has been posed and to understand the overall meaning of the ad. However, this technique is not commonly used when performing web design.
“Another factor that needs to ponder when using images on the web is that, the location of the images is more important. Most of the times people include images as a “decoration” as simple backgrounds that make navigation more user friendly and to indicate text that precedes them. This area is right for isolated cases, but it is best to make the most we can do to images, relating them to the products, services that we provider on the web page, showing the benefits users can get. In short, making communication a little more aggressive, which will certainly increase the impact on the users.
Another factor to ponder is to know the place where you will put the information. Today, people no longer visit sites through a computer. There are various devices available in the market such as Smartphone’s, PDA’s, iPad’s, Tabs, etc… What if a user visit your site through a device that doesn’t support images? Any information that go up will be imperceptible to the user, making the web page meaningless.
There are two different types of images used on the web pages:
- Aesthetic images such as background, shading, etc…
- Informative images such as products, services, logos, etc…
CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) is a kind of mechanism in the site that separates aesthetic images from the content. All the aesthetic images that need to be utilized on site should be added using CSS. Since this is purely aesthetic, you don’t need to insert any extra information using CSS.
Now, informative illustrations such as pictures of product, services should be included with the <img> tags, since it is a part of the web page and offers relevant information to the user. Usually, these images carries the ALT attribute to provide a description of the image, when you are unable to see it. For example, a proper ALT text for services image would be “Web Hosting Services”. For a logo image, the ALT text would be “Host.co.in Logo”.
The optimization of images also helps you in your hosting as well. The proper optimization of images using the right tool reduces the size of the images that you are utilizing for your website, helping you save more space on your server to utilize somewhere else.
Hence, when coding the design of a website or web pages, you must consider that it is designed fine, clear and with well defined elements. All the web page offering products and services must have relevant images and accompanying text to simplify the meaning.