Is it a good idea to have your website all in graphics?
Recently, there has been a rise in the trend of making entire websites from images and graphics. You can find some very beautiful websites completely built out of graphics. Such websites commonly use heavy flash presentations – superior design and slideshows of images as a flash, JavaScript or Java applet. Many companies find this approach to web design interesting and attractive.However, if you are one of them, before you decide on such an approach, consider these downsides that might make you change your mind:
- Having a large number of graphics is heavy for a website and will surely slow down your website's download time. Never mind the HTML file, as it is small only because images are so big in file size. In addition, it will need nearly the same amount of time to download every individual page of your website.
- Another consequence of huge images and little or too little text is that such websites are harder and more expensive to maintain. Changing a single word in an ordinary website is a job of 5 minutes or less. Changing the same word for a graphics website takes a lot more time. You need to find the original image, correct the text, and upload it to the same place with the same file name. That is quite straightforward if you have your original image source. Otherwise, you might end up searching for the correct font, for example, and then multiply that by two if you are changing a word in a link. These operations are very time-consuming compared to the time needed for textual changes. At best, for an image change, it takes 15 minutes.
- You will also lose traffic provided by the search engines. Search engine spiders are based on words and text, and by having an all-graphics website you are making it difficult for them to be read. Spiders will read your images, but in such an imperfect way that you have almost no chance of gaining a high search engine rating.
- Search engine optimization seems as impossible task. Considering the fact that an all-graphics website is not as readable by search engines, such optimization would really have no effect.
- Some visitors will not be able to view your website. This is because some visitors turn off images either for security reasons or to avoid annoying images. For them, without text your website looks empty. Even worse, such visitors will not be able to use your website at all if you are not adding alt tags for every image.
- If you are not slicing your images, website links will be an enormous bother. In such cases, you would need to use image maps that are not user-friendly as plain text links.
- Websites based on text and decorated with images are cheap to maintain and they can be dynamic. For example: A Content Management System, CMS, could be installed as a baseline software. A CMS reduces maintenance time and requires less effort for textual changes, since everything is done online through web based graphical user interface, GUI, or via desktop applications, able to connect to remote database server.
- Every visitor is able to read content and navigate pages. More visitors able to read your website means more traffic.
- Your website downloads much faster. Every page loads quickly compared to all-graphics website. It is also quite satisfying for any viewer if a web page downloads fast and no time is wasted on waiting.
- A text website is much more search engine friendly and with well-written content, your website has a good chance of obtaining a high search engine ranking. As it is well-known that search engines can bring you huge website traffic, you should foresee what that amount of traffic means while your business grows.
- Search engine optimization is possible and can help improve search engine ranking. To read more about how SEO can help your business, click here.
The Attention Interactive Los Angeles Web Design And Development Agency can help you create an all-graphics website in the most professional way, but we would always suggest that you choose a text website instead. If you would like to talk this over to determine what is better for your company, do not hesitate to call us for a free consultation.
