Graphics for websites
When I first started building websites most people’s internet bandwidth was very low compared to today’s broadband speeds. HTML 2.0 was current and as yet there was no international standard for HTML. The browser that was becoming popular was ‘ Mosaic’ – one of the reasons that it was becoming popular was that it allowed images to be displayed on a web page; previously they had to be viewed separately. In those times great care had to be taken to write web pages as efficiently as possible.
Even as late as 2005 it was not safe to assume that all of your website visitors would have access via high speed links. Indeed, even today some people still access the internet at “dial-up” speeds, but for internet marketing purposes it is probably safe to ignore them.
All this history has meant that I have tended towards websites that use few graphics; the advent of ‘styles’ and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) meant that I could produce good looking websites with almost no graphics. These websites were very easy to produce (once an initial template had been developed) and were very efficient. They also had the advantage that they could be persuaded to display properly (if not exactly the same) on all browsers.
But times have now changed. For my latest website, one of my graphic designer friends suggested that a decent set of “professional” graphics would increase the length of time visitors would stay on my site. This made me listen – I have always ignored the arguments about making the website “look better”; I don’t really care too much about that for an internet marketing site, but increasing the opportunity of making a sale is different.
So I drew up a specification for a local website graphic designer and got a quote. To say that my response was “you have got to be joking!” is an understatement. But then I came across an advert for a graphics designer in the Far East; his prices looked much much better, in fact much less than I was willing to pay.
So I looked around further and came across another Far East graphic designer who was highly recommended by a couple of people whose views I respect. He had a standard website package for what I needed for $27. A couple of emails later we had agreed the specification and two working days later I had my graphics. They look great.
Let’s now see if the graphics do indeed increase the length of time visitors stay on my site and increase my income.
