Our Thoughts on Image Use

The use of images in a Web site is important for appearance, but images should not, as a general rule, be used in place of text. While an image's alt text may be indexed, 'real' text holds greater weight. The use of images for text is also not a best practice for many reasons. When having a Web site designed you should keep the following in mind, as well as tell your designer what you expect.

Browser safe fonts should be used for text. Special fonts cannot be counted on because not all computers will have that font installed. There are plenty of resources on the web that discuss web safe fonts, all that is required is picking your favorite search site and entering the search term "Browser Safe Fonts".

Browser safe fonts should always be used for navigational links. While adding images to the backgrounds and and borders of links can make them look nice, images should not be used to represent links on a Web site.

When text is added to the heading area of a design, it is acceptable in some instances to use images if there is something special about the font used. For instance, there might be some special effect added to the text that cannot be recreated using CSS or perhaps the font has a special significance to the business that owns the Web site. These are considered part of the design rather than part of the text. In such cases W3 Teck will use accepted CSS text replacement techniques to insert the image while preserving the text in the page. The text replacement techniques used by W3 Teck preserve the text in the page while at the same time not being considered "Suspicious Practices" that might cause a site to be removed from search engine results.

Designing for the web is not the same as designing for print. Many traditional designers do not understand this limitation, even though the web has been around for almost 20 years (and even when the designer says that they design for the web.) The web designer does not have complete control over how their design will be viewed as does a print designer. When looking for a designer, don't just ask if they have done web design, look at their work and example sites. Ask yourself if these examples demonstrate the designer's ability to release control of the design. If you turn off images, what do you see? If you turn of CSS, is the page still usable?

W3 Teck will refuse to accept a project that requires the use of images rather than text in areas that should remain text. Before we will accept a project where we must take someone else's design and turn that design into a web site, we will insist on seeing the file that we will create the template from. Our acceptance of such projects will always depend on our final approval of the design.

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