Great Uses of Images in Web Design
Images in Web design may be photographs (scanned, digital, stock photos), clip art, drawings, logos and more. Stock photos are royalty-free photos that are either free to use or offered at a price depending on usage and uniqueness desired. If you don't mind other sites using the same image, just buy the usage, but if you want your site to be the only one with that image, buy the full, exclusive use of the photos. The use of images in Web design is often to enhance text with explanatory or relevant images, fill up a page, serve as a location for a link, or as a company or product logo.
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Explanations of Text
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Text content on Web pages that describes a process, steps or how to do something benefits from images that demonstrate the steps or resemble the process. This enhances the user's comprehension of the content as well as providing something other than plain text to look at. Take photographs of the steps of a process, such as a recipe or craft project, to use as demonstrations of each step. Or search stock photos, clip art or other sources of images for something that closely resembles the process or steps. If using clip art or stock photos, it's a good idea to try and keep all the images similar on one page,. For example, avoid using a cartoon clip art image for step three when steps one and two have photos or stock images featuring real people.
Break Up Large Bodies of Text
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Information sites such as encyclopedias, as well as personal websites or blogs benefit from using images to break up large bodies of text. Text becomes boring, and the sight of long passages to read is generally unappealing to Internet users who wish to search text quickly and move on. Break up text into shorter sections or paragraphs with a space in between. Then insert images that relate to the text in different parts throughout the Web page. Try to keep images near the text associated with them to avoid confusion in viewers.
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Direction Cues, Buttons and Links
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Clip art symbols such as arrows, signs or shapes are great for offering directional cues to website users. For example, place right and left arrows at the bottom of a page to direct users to the "next" (right) or "previous" (left) pages. Insert links to the next and previous pages to make the directional cues active and usable. You can place clip art images and symbols, re-sized so they're smaller, throughout text or as part of a navigation menu and used in place of navigation buttons, such as a little envelope that leads to the "contact" page of the website. Additionally, insert links into images, photos or other artwork that brings the user to a larger version of the image or to more information.
Logos
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Company logos or personal logos for a product, brand or image make great additions to websites associated with a company, product, brand or person. Graphic designers create logos for companies, but also offer logo design for other uses at varying rates. Alternatively, design your own logo using a simple paint or drawing program (standard on nearly every computer operating system) or a more advanced program if available. Use the logo in the header of the website pages, where it is clearly seen the moment someone enters the page, usually at the top right, left or center with the company, product, brand or image name associated with it. Use this logo on business cards, invoices, stationery and newsletters to represent the company or name.
Photo or Image Galleries
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Some Web designers find themselves faced with too many great images or photos to use for a website's primary design. In this case, rather than pick and choose which images to use and which to ignore, the Web designer selects the best images for the main Web pages and puts other images in a photo gallery. The photo gallery works a lot like a photo album in displaying a lot of photos or images with some organization and structure but without having to find exact places on each Web page for each image. Galleries work well in food and recipe websites. You can display images of the food with the option to add links to take users to the recipes associated with each image. The gallery option works well in place of a table of contents for some sites, such as travel or hobby sites, where the images may have a subtitle and links to other pages providing more information.
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References
- Photo Credit John Foxx/Stockbyte/Getty Images
