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Graphics Versus Text in Web Design
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| In web design like life, it isn't always perfectly obvious what's the most important. Marketing people feel graphics in web design make a web page more viable - programmers feel its the text, this argument goes back and forth. So who should break this opinion tie - the audience. And the most significant audience is Google, because if you don't have Google or other search engines then you don't have the human audience either - no ifs, ands or buts.
At times I look up web pages in a text-only browser. This is to see how they offer information to text-only devices such as palm, cell phones, gps, etc., or when I am trying to get information that I truely want about a specific event or business product or service without having to crawl my way through a bunch of graphics.
In these text-only travels one sees web pages in a true accessibility mode. A mode that is accessible to both human and machine. Remember that the Internet is adolescent and we are only now starting to have web-active devices that can automatically mine the Internet on our behalf as we interact with them - such as refrigerators, global position locators. Much more is forthcoming as the web matures.
Imagine if the web were mostly animations or graphic picturess. Such would make it very extremely difficult for your GPS (such as GM OnStar) to perform proximity searches when looking for a hotel for example. There are hundreds of examples here now and likely thousands that we have yet no way of knowing about within our future. A graphics oriented web page always finishes last in any race to disseminate information whether to a human or machine, just as you wouldn't be able to compete well in the Indy 500 with a car having square wheels.
I've always said, for a site to be totally accessible, you should be capable of browsing it in a braille reader. Some people would say - i'm not selling to the blind so why should I keep my web site so accessible?"
Why? Because the most powerful Internet force in the universe visits your web pages like blind people - Google! Google is blind and reads web pages linearly as the code is sent to the browser, it then tries to interpret what it sees.
Google doesn't give a left-handed middle finger about how pretty your page looks in Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Safari, or any other web browser. Google cares about content, links to your site, TITLE tags, and so much more that an entire industry has evolved trying to figure out what Google likes and dislikes.
A successful web site is always one that Google likes, it doesn't matter if you spend a million dollars on cute graphics and Flash animations. Our web site www.webdbx.com for example scores high with Google and we get compliments about it every day, yet some complain that it should be much more visual and less textual. The graphics versus text design argument continues - but a hybrid graphic and text-based web pages continues to score the highest.
Google-ize your web site and you acheive a higher page ranking. Your competition can spend thousands on graphics design but who cares about them if 90% of the market web traffic is coming to you. Text is how Google views the web and Google is god - so don't @#$% her off.
Steve McEachern - October 2004
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