Website Design Basics – Avoid Image Backgrounds

Joshua Texeria   – Raleigh, NC
123Triad: Web Design & SEO Company

Website Design Basics – Avoid Image Backgrounds

Think about all of the big sites you have visited. EBay, Yahoo, Amazon and others. What do they have in common? Simple backgrounds.

While it is often tempting to use an image background to your site, it is incredibly difficult to pull off professionally, and more often than not, ends up looking amateurish.

Another key point to remember is that image files are usually extremely large, which means they take a long time to load. Forcing visitors to either wait for your site to load, or look elsewhere.

Internet users, by their nature, expect almost instant gratification when searching for information, so if you make them wait, you may lose visitors.

Moreover, do not think its only small sites that are guilty of this! Global social networking sites, like Myspace, have been singled out as offenders. These sites not only have graphic backgrounds, but also forced music, ads and popups, making them slow to load, and somewhat intrusive.

That having been said, you do not have to ban images completely. Well-executed graphics on a landing page can work, however, again, try to keep the file size to a minimum.

So why do image backgrounds have such a bad reputation? Well, aside from the look, which is often a problem, and the loading time, it has become a trend for sites with image backgrounds to contravene netiquette too.

Sites with image backgrounds are often guilty of other faux pas, such as slow page loading times, key word stuffing and obvious spelling and grammar errors, not to mention popups and forced advertising.

Therefore, it seems, there is a very fine line between acceptable use of graphics as a background, and it is very easy to cross that line! If you are designing your own site, you may want to avoid the idea completely, to avoid the possibility of an unprofessional look.

If you are using a professional web designer, do not assume that they know this – voice your concerns with them, before making a decision!

Look for examples of sites on the web that have backgrounds you like, and which load relatively quickly and are easy to navigate. Then provide those sites as examples to your designer.

As always, the golden rule of web design is: keep it simple.

123Triad webdesign offers affordable custom website design. Our full service website design company only hires certified website designers. Please contact us today on 1-800-720-0816 for your next web site design project.

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