While I may not like some of the websites that get submitted to the various directories I manage I can appreciate that not everyone can design (I can’t!). However one of my pet hates are the image only sites. You know the ones I mean.
Instead of pages of text they are one big ugly image. No text. No links. Nothing clickable or spiderable.
You’d need to use OCR technology to get any content or meaning from them.
Why do people do that?
And what’s more worrying ….
Are they actually paying for it?
There are so many issues with image only sites that it’s hard to choose one to start with:
- Lack of text
- “Text” is not scalable
- Text cannot be spidered
- Screenreaders won’t see anything
- 56k dialup users will probably have to wait forever to see it (if they are patient enough to actually wait)
That is something that also concerns me from what I have seen in the past. Not so much with personal sites but more of the local business sites, I don’t think many of them realise how important design is.
Oh and like you I too cant design, very jealous of those who can. 🙂
Gavin
We had a client a couple of years ago that was using one of those image only sites and was selling web design! What made it worse was that they referred to other designers as being rip off merchants etc 🙂
M
To have a site that is designed using a lot of images and still be seo friends I would suggest using a pure css layout with all of you images as backgrounds of divs that are defined on a style sheet. This way you can still have your images but the search engines will see dive tags and content. The only drawback is getting used to designing with css and getting away from ever using a table tag.