Using and Misusing Graphics
Graphics are a wonderful way to brighten up a page. Icons and buttons and lines are wonderful for giving a page some personality and spirit. A whole page full of iconse can get visually annoying, though. And please go easy on the animations, a page full of bouncing, whirling, blinking pictures makes most of us very dizzy. Also very likely to hit the stop button and turn graphics off, or even leave the site entirely.
Photos are great, one of my favorite sites is photo.net, but I really don't want a 300kb photograph as your background image, or on your front page. I'd really like to be given a choice, and a warning that it's time to go get another coffee while the picture is downloading. Give me a thumbnail (small picture) with a link to the full size one. If you do that, I may well look at the big picture - but if you unexpectedly give me the big one, I'll hit the stop button!. Especially if you aren't an artist's site.
Graphic-only pages are even more boring than text-only pages, especially when my ISP decides to slow down to a crawl and I have my graphics turned off. Please never ever take a picture of your text and put it on the web as a graphic. If you are that bad at HTML, hire me and I'll do itfor you! For a fee, of course. You aren't going to impress people by admitting you can't write a simple web page. If you happen to be one of those types that just must have the page in their favorite font, and is turning pages into graphics just so they will look 'right', I have only one thing to say. Get a clue! The web is not a glossy magazine. The web is not a television either. It's a whole new media. Stop trying to make it into an old one.
Graphics are beautiful, a few photographs or cute cartoons are a great enhancement to almost any site. But even the previously mentioned photo.net has a whole lot of text content. In the case of the net, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but if it takes as long to load as ten thousand words, is it really worth it?
Unless you are a photographer, painter, or some other for of visual artist, please don't overdo the graphics. And please, if you do take my suggestion and make thumbnails that link to a larger picture, please use a graphics program to make the the thumbnail. Just using height and width tags to make a picture smaller does no good at all. See the pictures below for an explanation.
This large and small bars are exactly the same picture, the small one has merely been resized with height and width tags. If I used it instead of the one above, it would still take exactly the same time to load. If you'd like to see a more graphic example, try the sunset picture on my sample page.
I'm sure everyone has seen the pages with way too many animated pictures, I doubt I need to set up samples of that. If you haven't, just go to your local search engine, type "free graphics download" and browse a few of those sites - most of them have at least a dozen animated ad banners that should give you a blazing headache!