How to avoid graphic overloads

Friday, 02 October 2009

When designing a website you should know some things about how to use images and graphics on your pages. There are more differences between simple websites, that have only few and little images and those websites that contain a lot of graphic content.

What are the problems these graphical websites?

First you will see that these websites load really slow, because the download takes too long. Usually internet users wait 5 seconds to see the content of website. If your website don’t contain useful info for user, or takes too long to load, you will never get quality hits.

What can you do to avoid this problem? Optimize your images in that way, to have the maximum compression of the files. Using jpeg or gif, is the best way to optimize you website images. But take care by compressing the images, because they are loosing the quality. You can also use 1px large images over your whole website, using the CSS and HTML codes.

Another problem when the website is too busy. If you use more than 4 images with full graphic on one page, the site visitors will does not focused on your content, because the web page has too much going on. This gives a really confused impression for your website users.

If you want to use images in the content you need to optimize it to be not too large, align it to the left or right side, depends on you, and explain more with text and not with images. You can use photo editing software to reduce the resolution of images. This way will reduce the file size also.

It’s important to have a good web design. Users come to your website to get information, not to look to your graphic, that can’t load. Too much graphic will distract the attention from the content or forced readers to search for it. Any time, when graphic stay between users and your website content, you are suffering from graphical overload. And this is not a good for a quality web site.

What to do to avoid the graphic overload? Simply decide which off all pictures are necessary and take out the graphics that can bother visitor attention.

Remember, don’t add graphic just to look cool and to have a pretty design, each picture must have a specific purpose and focused information source.