B2B Web Strategy Blog – eMagine

It’s safe to go back in the water with images again

February 16th, 2010 Posted by: Bill Gadless

In the beginning – circa 1994 – the Web was eagerly awaited as a place where visually interesting content would proliferate.  After all, was not HTML specifically designed for the (relatively) simple development of pages containing both images and text?  It’s no real accident that website development came to be most often called “website design”, and that at least as many of the initial crop of Webmasters came out of graphic design as out of IT.

It was a wild time, those late 90s:  Webmasters were dueling each other to put up the flashiest, jazziest sites;  and everyone and their grandma, it seemed, was lighting a fiber network to ensure the availability of the colossal bandwidth that would surely be needed to support all that Web traffic.  Then came a two-pronged cold shower of reality:

• the dot-com crash… and with it, the realization that there was now enough fiber capacity for the next decade, at the suddenly reduced usage growth rate;  and
• significant pushback from Web users, who increasingly wondered what all the hoopla was about as they snoozed over pages taking minutes to load via their dialup lines.

Pending resolution of the carriers’ chicken-&-egg “last-mile” issue, page-load times became a watchword among website owners, and the popularity of images took a bit of a nosedive.  But during the mid/late 00s, the carriers were finally able to put affordable broadband access within reach of most (though not quite all);  so now it’s time to remind ourselves of things we once knew, but may have back-burnered.  Things like, “a picture really is worth a thousand words.”

A useful text in this regard is Francis Raymond’s recent post over on Connect the Docs, which provides tips such as…

• Use a flowchart diagram to explain a complicated process, instead of explaining each step in gory detail;  then accompany the visual with shorter, punchier bullet points.
• For landing pages, images are absolutely essential …and make them clickable.
• Try putting your key presentations online …perhaps hosted on a site like slideshare.net.

As Francis reminds us, “(Don’t) ignore the importance of powerful images to attract and engage the audience.  Images are typically much more effective at drawing the eye and evoking strong reactions.”

And let’s not forget about video …a tool that wasn’t even available to those fresh-faced Web pioneers.  If a picture is worth 1,000 words, what’s a jillion or so frames worth?!

Entry Filed under: B2B Web Strategy