When designing a website, it’s easy to start loading it up with graphics. While tempting, you have to resist — otherwise, you’ll end up with graphical overload.

Why is that a bad thing? Here’s why.

It Takes Too Long to Download

The first reason to cut down on graphics is that the more there are, and the larger they are, the longer it will take each of your pages to download. People are impatient when waiting for pages to download — you only have around 5 seconds before your visitor hits the Back button.

What can you do about this? Apart from using fewer pictures, you can also make sure that you resize your images in a graphics editor. This actually makes their file sizes smaller. If you just resize images by specifying a width and height in HTML or CSS, they will still be slow to download because the full file size is being used.

You should consider turning on compression in your image editor. JPEG files can often be compressed by up to 25% before there’s a noticeable difference in quality. Try different formats and compression levels to see what works.

It Gets Too Busy

If you use a site with more than 4 images on the page at once, your eyes are being pulled all over the page. They’re not sure where to focus because the page simply has too much going on.

Look at the front pages of newspapers, and notice how they lead on 1 picture. Putting 2 pictures on a front page is considered to be poor: the reader doesn’t know where to look.

That goes double for websites, where the viewable area is much smaller than a newspaper page. Even if you have more than 1 thing to say, it’s better to ‘go large’ with 1 picture and then explain the other things in text, next to or below it.

It Distracts from the Content

Users visit your site to get information, not to look at your graphics. Too many graphics will distract from your content, or, worse, force readers to search for it. Any time your graphics get in the way of people readily using your site, you’re suffering from graphical overload. And that is a bad thing.

What’s the solution? Simply decide which of all those graphics are really necessary. Remember, don’t add graphics just to look nice, each graphic must have a specific purpose.

An Exception: Photo Galleries

If the purpose of your site is photo presentation, then clearly multiple images are appropriate. However, don’t just stick up several large photographs — provide thumbnails: smaller versions of each image. If interested, the visitor can click on 1 to make it larger.

This fits more pictures on each page, and avoids wasting user download time and your bandwidth.

Keep in mind that in all web design, the images are there strictly to support the content. Even when the content is graphical.

Visit Web Design DIY to learn more. Ron King is a full-time researcher, writer, and web developer, visit his website at Website

Copyright 2005 Ron King. This article may be reprinted if the resource box is left intact and the links live.

Source: High Quality Article Database – 365Articles.com

 Video Microsites – The Brand Story Campaign Solution
Everybody wants to do more business. Everybody occasionally runs a promo, a new marketing initiative, a product launch, or a new seasonal lineup. Everybody has a website stuffed with all kinds of content ranging from the important to the useless. But only the truly smart business minds understand that campaigns require their own space and identity if they are to succeed. And when it comes to using the Web as your vehicle for such a campaign, the obvious solution is a Video Campaign Microsite. What's A Video Campaign Microsite?Video Campaign Microsites are websites that employ a series of highly focused video....

 No wonder it’s so hard to make money on the Net.
At a recent Internet Conference that my sons and I were teaching, I was reminded about one of the most serious problems that we all face in Internet Marketing, and that is information overload. What do I mean? Let's look at a typical day in the life of an Internet Marketer. 9am... you sit down to your computer, with the intent of writing a new website, because you just KNOW that this will be the most profitable project you ever built. But before you get into that, you'd....

 Mistakes that Can Bury a Blog
Too often bloggers complain that after a great start, a year later their blog is as dead as can be. This is a common problem that almost always revolves around a small list of common mistakes made by the blogger. A blogger can sit back and expect the blog to do all of the work for him or her, which is a terrible way to approach blogging. A successful blogger would tell you that great blogging takes a certain amount of dedication and hard effort to make it work. You have to put effort....

 Be Concise
oncise by: Dr. Donald E. WetmoreConcision. (Sounds like I made up another word.) It's the idea of being concise in our ongoing communication with others, both written and oral.Many take forever to say so little. These are the same people who spend a lot of time in meetings. Some who may have little to say use lots of words to say what could be said in a few words. It is boring. It wastes time. It reduces productivity. Theirs and yours.I do not suggest that all of our communications ought to be reduced to one or two words. There ought to....

 Photo Blogging To Success
Many people feel that photo blogging is the most exciting kind of blogging that exists. Building and maintaining a photo blog is no more difficult than creating and updating a text-based blog, and many people feel that the internet's high speed, full-color technology reaches the pinnacle of its appeal with the transmission of images. Posting photographs in a blog format on a daily, weekly, or occasional basis is a great way to express yourself while reaching viewers in an emotionally charged and aesthetically engaging way, and surfing photo blogs can help you to....

 Why is Optimizing Your Site For Speed is Important? Tips on How to do so!
by: Anthony Jewell If there is one thing we have all suffered through is waiting for a site to download online. It seems like it is the worse thing in the world and will never end. We actually either click off of the site or after the initial download of the frontpage completes, we then click off of the site because the subpages take too long to load. We have all been here and this article is to help make sure your visitors don't go through it as well. The reason why a websites speed of download is important is actually very....

 Web Design The 10 Biggest Mistakes
There are plenty of mistakes in the world of web design. Let's look at what I believe to be the 10 biggest. 1. Too Many Ads. When you're trying to make money from your website, it's all too easy to overwhelm your site with ads. Put yourself in your user's place and take a good hard look at your site and ask yourself if the ads feel intrusive. Does the site look like an information source or does it feel more like a page-holder for the ads? 2. Plugin Overload. You have to keep plugin useage to a maximum....

 10 Persuasive Triggers To Plug Into Your Ad
ersuasive Triggers To Plug Into Your Ad by: Larry Dotson 1. Most people want to win over others. Tell your prospects how their family or friends will admire them if they buy your product. 2. Most people want to associate with others that have the same interests. Give your prospects a free membership in a private chat room just for them. 3. Most people want a clean environment. Tell your prospects that you'll donate a percentage of your profits to help clean the environment. 4. Most people want to eat good food. Give your customers free coupons to a nice restaurant when they purchase your....

 Strengthen Your Website Content with Online Database Access
Strengthen Your Website Content with Online Database Access by: Mohd Zulfaezal Che Azemin http://www.Call-It-Cool.com/pips We live in a sea of information. And information overload is an increasingly common complaint. Part of the complaint arises because we get hit with different headlines that point to the same content. So we waste time on things that have no added value. Bummer. When you email your list or put up content on your site, and assuming you want to generate loyalty, it's necessary that you have content others haven't seen a dozen times elsewhere. If this makes sense to you, here are some ideas you can....

 Web-Based Applications – Pathway to the Future
Web-based applications are indeed a pathway to the future. Find out why. Web-based applications are quickly paving their way as the preferred platform for business information systems and critical applications. Combine the communication capabilities of the Internet with the exceptional development platforms available on the World Wide Web and you have a cost effective yet highly functional and secure application platform that far exceeds any standard Windows or Mac program. To put it simply for those of us who are new to the web, a web-based application is a program that resides entirely on the Internet. It is a multi-user cross-platform application that allows many users....

 Get Your Website To The Top Of Google And Stay There:
Your Website may be the slickest, most jaw-dropping beautiful creation known to man but its nothing if it isn't showing on the first page of google search results for your chosen speciality subject. Our starters for ten... Keywords An obvious first choice but still probably the most importantant element of a websites content. To the uninitiated a website isn't categorised by its graphical content but its words. It's therefore vitally important to make sure....

 5 Little-Known Secrets To Writing Articles That Beckon 1000s Of Visitors
Let's talk about writing articles that can bring tons visitors to your site, thus more profits. I know you've thought about it, and probably said, "Nah, I am not a writer". Well, there's a writer in all of us, and writing articles to gain expert status as well as targeted traffic is so important. You have to write articles that will engage your reader and hold their attention all the way through, as opposed to the usual “clicking and fleeing”. Have you ever clicked and fled? If yes, then you know how it feels like being the reader. This is what happens when your eyes are weary of the internet information overload.....

 SEO Effect Of Duplicate Content
There are a lot of ways that you can improve your site’s page ranking in search engines, unfortunately, not all of them are good. Some people employ certain methods in acquiring a high page rank in search engines, even if these are considered to be deceitful in the sense that they are designed to trick the search engines - one of these methods is actually duplicating web content. What is duplicate content? Duplicate content in SEO is actually any web content that is considered to be similar to another site. Search engines have actually implemented new filters specifically to monitor these types of....

 Chart your way to readable blogs
A few weeks ago I was writing a blog that was chock full of data.  I quickly realized that my blog post would be more efficient if I could display some of the data in a graph instead of text.  While once upon a time I used Microsoft Excel to create charts, that was many moons ago.  However, a quick search showed me that Web 2.0 has created a wide range of charting tools that allow even a charting novice to quickly create professional quality charts for their blog. DIY (Do It Yourself) Chart DIY Chart is a Web-based, simple and powerful....

 5 Ways to Make Your Blog a Failure
There are many things that a blogger should do when they start a new blog, but there are also a few things that will almost ensure failure. Here is a brief list of a few things that will almost ensure that your blog never gets off the ground. Don't post regularly – this is a great one if you want your new readers to never return to the site and to make sure that the search engines take their time indexing you. Posting once a week or less ensures that your readers rarely find anything new on your site and makes....

Trackback URL for this post:
http://www.problogtips.com/avoid-graphical-overload/678/trackback/

Posted by Jaron in the catagory of... General Interest

No Trackbacks »