Text vs Graphical Content, and how it can effect your Website

Lets face it, humans by nature are graphic focused creatures.  Bright colors and big logos draw our attention all the time. With brands, this is not really a bad thing, but with a Website going graphic heavy can actually do more harm than good.

Image files, in the modern age tend to take up more megabytes of the stream of data that is downloaded to the users device.  On slower speed desktops the time it takes for a Website to fully load can make or break connecting with potential clients. On Mobile devices it becomes even more important, as bytes downloaded = data plan fees.

There is actually a couple secondary concerns that speak to the benefits of using text, which can be styled through Cascading Style Sheets, over relying on graphical reliance.

Firstly, there is Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. SEO is the protocols that services like Google, Yahoo and Bing use to return results when a user searches.  This is done through the scraping of textual details, in both the Metadata and content of a Website.

Photos and graphics can return some information that helps with SEO, through things like proper use of the alternative tag when placing a image file (alt="filename"), but its not the primary way a site gets ranked.

Secondly, the World Wide Web is , as the name implies, a global playground. That means, not everyone who visits your Website might actually read the language your content was created in.  This creates a major linguistics issue if you have displayed your content in pre-formatted graphic files, as servers like Google Translate can not rewrite a picture.

For example, lets say you own a small Bed n Breakfast in Vancouver BC, a city that can and does get plenty of international tourist traffic.  With text base content, your website can be presented in almost any language that is globally spoken, but if your words are formatted into the photos, you have failed to bridge the language gap.