When choosing elements of web design many people wants lots of images. Images have some great benefits in web design. They allow you to guarantee that your content looks the same on several browsers or platforms. They can make layout very easy.

The downside is that they are not text. Why would that be a downside? Lets think about this. What gets you high on search engines? Search engines have web crawlers that go through your website. Now web crawlers are not single people that live with their mother being paid to cruise your website and check it out. Despite the name the reality is that web crawlers are programs running on the servers of your favorite search engine. These search engines literally read your site. They don’t view it. To see what a web crawler sees you would need to use a text only browser such as lynx, links, or my favorite elinks.

So you have this awesome design with all these great images and guess what, the crawlers can’t read anything that you have. Your site doesn’t get a high crawler rating and doesn’t increase in ratings etc. etc. etc.

How do you overcome this? Use text whenever possible with CSS manipulating it as needed. With new HTML5 features you can actually have custom fonts so that things match right. Also use alt tags on the pictures that you do need. Because lets face it, you need some pictures. Logos, backgrounds, and mugshots don’t do well in text. So on those pictures have appropriate alt tags. For instance on my logo the complete image tag is: <img src=’/images/header.png’ alt=”Open By Design” />. In a text browser the image shows up as ‘Open By Design’. Another great example is to have your mugshot there with an alt tag saying “your name, owner, operator, etc.”