Your content doesn't only include words. Photos, icons and other images also can be used to get your messages across.
But be very careful in how you use them. Make your Web page as easy to access and as simple to comprehend as possible.
Like all things in life, using graphics on a Web page means striving for balance.
Usability experts Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville note that users are turned off by:
Trite counters to moderately annoying, revolvingNEW!animated GIFs to frustrating frames to the Java applets that, after taking eons to download, don't add any functionality. … There shouldn't be any unnecessary bells and whistles. If the desired effect of the technology is to attract and captivate the user, then it must be very carefully applied; unless the technical designer is quite talented, the user will have likely seen it before and seen it done better.
There's nothing more annoying than an under construction
graphic. Rosenfeld and Morville have little patience for Web developers who use them:
We always encounter sites that are under construction. In fact, sometimes they seem to have been abandoned. … Users would probably prefer to know nothing of far-down-the-road changes than see an under construction graphic. …
Last modified August 22 2003 02:45 PM
