Use of Graphics in Business Website Design

Many business owners are primarily concerned with the "look and feel" of their new website. Website designers will often go to great lengths to come up with a graphic design scheme for a website that makes the business owner happy.

Keys to Graphic Design of a Website

A clean, simple look and feel is usually best. Most web visitors are looking for information and content, not a graphics-intensive page that may be too busy and too slow to load for dial-up users.

The first thing that your website should incorporate is a prominently displayed logo or corporate identity, if you have one. Your branding should be consistent - from your website, to your business cards, to your print advertisments, to your letterhead, and the like. A strategy of consistent branding will increase your customer's loyalty and help them remember you when they are in need of your type of product or services in the future.

Next, you want a navigation scheme that is logical and simple to use, which avoids orphaned pages - pages that are not linked to any other page - and the navigation should be consistent throughout your website to minimize any confusion. Ease of navigation is especially critical in an ecommerce environment, where even the slightest bit of confusion can result in abandoned shopping carts - which translates into lost sales.

Sites that are heavy in graphical content, while perhaps aesthetically pleasing to the naked eye, are not at all pleasing to search engines - as a search engine is not able to tell what a picture depicts (unless, of course, it is told via the use of special hidden code, which is a critical part of an effective search engine optimization).

Human Users versus Search Engines

So, the key to a well designed site is for it to be both pleasing to the human eye and the search engine robots who will look at your site from a coding standpoint. The way to do this is to ensure that, while the use of nice, clean, attractive graphics is not only desirable but often necessary to pique human interest, there should also be included in the website rich, relevant content - or text - that delivers your site's message effectively to both humans and search engines alike.