The Importance of Website Imagery

How you feel if you logged onto your computer and your desktop background of your holiday from Barbados had disappeared? You were faced with a machine full of black and white text with no pictures…

Not great.

Companies have made millions of pounds creating user friendly interfaces for otherwise boring looking programmes, adding colour to blank backgrounds and comedy egg timers, all the make the experience more enjoyable for the users.

So why would companies forget these rules and create a website full of text and no images?

Imagery on websites is extremely important for two reasons.

Firstly it is essential to make your website as aesthetically appealing as it can be, if achieved you will be able to hold your visitors attention for longer and encourage them to come back. Visitors to your site don’t want to be face with a screen full of text so make it interesting for them, images can break up long passages of text and can add further explanation to text. In an ideal world they should complement each other, be used in conjunction to inform and entertain your reader.

The selected images need to add to the overall visual experience. Sometimes visitors can be drawn in by the use of an image which then causes them to read the text around it. However on the other extreme a website with hundreds of pictures and little text support are vague and often do not contain as much information as the visitor would like, so a good balance needs to be achieved.

Secondly, despite there being great debate, images can be used to increase optimisation of your website. Therefore images can make a difference to your ranking on Google.com. To do this however it is essential to alt tag your images, this is a 3-4 word description as to what the image is, the better the description the better results you obtain. As the famous catchphrase presenter says: Say what you see! One way to check if your description is the best it can be is to read it to a person who has not seen the image to see if they can visualise a version of the image.

Both imagery and text are important on a website and often selecting the right ones can be there hard part. You need to strike a good balance between both in order to cater to all your visitors needs and wants. One final note of warning however, it is important to remember to ensure that the images you choose are properly credited, you could open up a minefield…


Article Written by Carli Smith


Visit Inferno Designs for more on istock & Website Imagery and Company Branding.