Website Images, Decoration and Text
There are two main types of images used on websites:
- Decorative Images
- Informative Images
Decorative images are just used to make the page look nice and have no place in the main web page document. If you want to print out an information only version of a page full of embedded images then - tough! By using CSS style sheets to add the fancy images onto an information based document this becomes a simple task.
Informative images do belong in the document, and as long as adequate alternate text descriptions are tagged onto the images for visually impaired visitors and for visitors who have chosen not to display images then this is fine.
All the fancy headings in this website use an image replacement technique. The headings are present in the document as normal text but they are 'tagged' with special classes. The CSS file stores details of the images to be used to replace these text headings. So if a 'graphically challenged' user reads this page they will see the text version. Visitors with standard browsers will see the pretty text image versions.
Text is often misunderstood by clients, we are often asked if we can design a web page using handwriting script fonts or specialised fonts that the client may have installed on their computer. The simple answer to this question is No! Web pages are rendered using the fonts installed on the visitor's browser and we have no way of knowing which fonts they may have installed, so we use a set of fonts that most users will have installed. You may have seen sites that had pretty script type fonts - this would have been either you had the font specified by the designer present on your computer (the page may have looked pretty sad if it had defaulted back to standard fonts). The other way some designers display non-standard fonts is to use image files to display text - this is shockingly bad design and we don't do it!
We use top quality compression software to ensure all the images on our sites are compressed as much as possible without losing too much quality. Not every visitor has broadband, some small companies share a broadband connection between users and sometimes the internet is just flipping slow for no reason! Properly compressed images load quicker so visitors are happy.