Our serialisation of ‘Top Tips for building a website’ continues. In Part 1 of this series we gave some advice on planning your new site, and in Part 2 we had some pointers on writing copy that sells, as well as some excellent SEO tips. Today, Jonathan from the Price Engines I.T Department talks about using images on your website….
“Welcome back to our website mini-masterclass. Today I want to take a look at another crucial area that is all to often handled very badly indeed: the use of images on your website.Just about every website on the internet uses images – photographs and graphics to help convey what exactly it is they’re selling or promoting. Photographs of products can really help cut down on the amount of text you need to use, while photographs of products in use can demonstrate the value of your product. Less clutter equals a better, clearer selling message.
Logos and buttons help create a corporate identity and aesthetic that will compliment your existing literature or livery. They say a picture tells a thousand words – so help your website visitors by cutting down the amount of reading they have to do.
However, there are several common mistakes in the way websites use pictures. In this article I’m going to help you avoid them in the future.
The first, and most common, mistake is making the images too large. Don’t make your images so big that their file size causes your website to download slowly – your potential customers may give up and turn away from your site before it’s even finished loading.
- To get around this, optimise images to have smaller files sizes. The file size is the key factor – the bigger the file size, the longer it will take to ‘appear’ on someone’s screen.
- Make sure the image is the size of the space on the website it will be filling – don’t put large image files onto your site and then scale them down, you’re just wasting your users time.
- Remember that screen resolutions are a lot more forgiving then printed material – cut those 300 dpi resolutions to 72dpi and select medium quality in .jpg mode rather than .tiff file extensions.
- If you’re still having trouble getting the file size down, try cropping your photographs to cut down on physical size – lots of things happening in the background will only distract anyway. If you need your visitors to see the detail in the image, try making two versions – one compressed and cropped thumbnail version which goes on the page, and one full size version which the visitor sees when they click on the thumbnail.
Finally, a word on Flash. Flash is a tool from Adobe which can be used to create beautiful animated websites which have become quite popular, particularly amongst designers, artists and musicians. It may seem tempting to make your site in Flash and have text and icons whizzing all over the screen, but be aware that Flash does cause some significant problems for business websites. Most significantly, Flash sites often take a long time for the animations to load, which puts some visitors off.
Flash also has accessibility issues – though Flash may work fine on a standard computer, you should consider customers who are using mobile devices to view your page – or customers with disabilities who use text-only or spoken-word browsers. Flash can be very difficult for them and often your site needs to be built twice – once in Flash and once in HTML.
The other problem with Flash is that search engines can’t read Flash sites. If a search engines can’t read the text on your site, you’ve lost several brownie points in the Optimisation race and your competitors can gain an advantage over you.
As you can see, images and animations can add a lot to your website – a picture tells a thousand words, after all. Make sure,
Next time, Jonathan will be giving away a few top optimisation tips that you can try implementing yourself (or asking your web designer to do for you) that may help you up the natural listings a bit higher.
He’ll also be introducing the idea of business blogging. If you don’t already have a blog, there’s loads of free tools readily available to help you create another powerful seo tool that will not only aid your website – but just might attract a whole new audience into the bargain.