Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Visual Appeal in Website Design

Content is an essential factor for the success of a website. But often visual appeal is the determining factor as to whether or not a client or customer will remain on a site long enough to actually see the product or service the business is providing. Visual appeal sometimes work wonders for any business. Study shows often consumers buy products which they like than which they need. Visual appeal can drive any customer to purchase a product or service today.

Automatic Thumbnails

Thumbnails are the easiest way to view images. These are the one click operation which can be operated without any coding knowledge. Thumbnails allow the designer to display large images without reducing page load time. You can also hyperlink the images to be opened in a new window.

Optimization of Graphics

No matter how good you design your graphics, if it takes long time to load then all your labor will be fruitless. Visitors won't stay long enough to see your page loading. You can use FrontPage (FP) to save your graphics which can reduce the loading time. Save your images in better resolution formats like JPEG and GIF. JPEG is the best and widely used image format while GIF is for computer generated graphics or transparent images. You can significantly reduce the image loading time without changing your image quality.

Picture Properties and Alt Tags

Alt tags are now important for search engine optimization. This gives the required content for the images. Search engines can read alt tags for the images. If you are coding manually then alt tags can be a simple way of coding. These tags don't need any special coding skill and can be done easily and quickly. Alt tags help you to get recognized by the search engines. Even if your graphics won't load in certain browsers, search engines can at least read your alt tag. Be particular while choosing images. Maintain similar image properties through out your site so that the visitors won't feel image jerk in the website. FrontPage can fix the same size for you. This can make the total process similar and easy, so that you can have great images in your website.

Photo Editing

Photo editing can be done to adorn the image. It can be a last minute finishing touch to your images. Though many designers prefer different photo editors but it is just to create quality graphics.