Logo Design & Website Design by firebubble

The use of images can make or break the effectiveness of your website design. A well chosen picture can be an incredibly powerful tool to grab the attention of a visitor, inform them in a glance as to what your website is actually about and generally enhance the aesthetic appeal of your website. Images that are selected poorly and scattered inelegantly around your pages could have the opposite effect though, immediately putting off anyone that could have been interested.

An image gallery could be the answer that you have been looking for, as it provides you with the opportunity to collect all of your images together and to display them in a very attractive way. Different image galleries offer different layouts such as a strip of thumbnails or a constantly updating slideshow, but all can be a massive enhancement to your website design. As many of these gallery resources can be found online for no cost it may be worth exploring the possibility of incorporating one into your own website now.

There are some important considerations to bear in mind when choosing your image gallery though. How will your images look within your webpages? How much space can you allocate to images within your design? How can a user find the image that they are looking at and, perhaps, enlarge it?

What will the image gallery look like?

The ideal image gallery will depend completely on the existing look and feel of your own website design. For example, a sleek, modern and minimalistic website design may be enhanced by a simple column of thumbnail images to be found within the sidebar of your pages. A funky, brightly coloured and engaging website though may better suit a Flash based spinning image carousel.

Consider your target audience as you consider the best type of image gallery. Try to put yourself in their shoes and imagine what you would like to see and what would fit in well with your existing design. Spend some time looking around the web at the different types of gallery available to find the best solution for your own unique design.

How will a visitor interact with your images?

The vast majority of image galleries will contain some form of collection of thumbnail pictures that can be enlarged upon the click of a visitor. It is important therefore to consider exactly what will happen upon a mouse click. Consider some of the following options:

-       The image could be opened on a new page within the user’s internet browser.

-       The image could open in a popup LightBox effect window, with the website behind the image greyed out for effect.

-       The image could just be a static thumbnail, with no option to enlarge it.

How large will your images be?

Whenever dealing with images on a website it is important to remember how large the images will be. Larger images will take a longer time to load which could be a problem for any visitors viewing your website on a particularly slow internet connection. Try to keep your images to as small a size as possible without damaging their resolution to ensure that the pages of your website always load quickly and efficiently.

Author Note: (The above article has been added to our Website Design Articles section as part of our efforts to help provide our website visitors and customers with an insight into the Logo Design and Website Design industry).

Copyright Note: (Permission is Not granted for these articles to be featured on other websites or blogs).