Ways to Improve Your Website's Images

Images are a vital part of most websites. They can enhance your website's aesthetics and influence the selling of your products so it's important that you do all you can to optimise the appearance of the images on your website.

Here are three ways you can do this.

Animated photo galleries
Rather than just displaying a number of images one next to the other, an animated gallery enables you to showcase them in a professional, efficient and attractive way.

Forcing visitors to click or scroll through a barrage of pictures is likely to lose their attention. An animated gallery excels because it automatically and continuously scrolls through images, as well as giving the option to manually scroll through them.

Animated galleries will give your business a professional and design-savvy look. This helps to build trust with your customers – essential if you're selling products from your website.

Instead of just using one photograph, you can display lots of them in the same space. So, if you've only got room for a few photos, an animated gallery provides you with the chance to showcase many more. This means your site will have greater impact and leave more room for other important content.

Designing, editing and implementing the galleries is easy. Most allow you to drag-and-drop images into a pre-designed template, or if you prefer, you can design the whole thing from scratch.

Borders, drop shadows and reflections
Perhaps the simplest solution to improve the look of your website's images is to add borders. This technique of bringing pictures ‘off the page' is effective and, with free downloadable photo editing software readily available, it is easy to do.

Adding a border to your images is particularly effective if you've got a busy background or a lot going on in your web page. Borders give an image definition, where they'd otherwise be lost.

Another simple option is to add a drop shadow – again, it's easy to do using photo editing programs. The drop shadow goes one further because it adds a third dimension – the shadow makes it look like the image is lifted off the background.

A reflection is another good effect to use. It's slightly trickier to apply, but you'll find many tutorials online. Reflections add a further dimension to images, making them seem placed on the page, drawing visitors' eyes towards them.

Alignment
Another simple solution to improving images on your website is to align them, i.e. keeping images accurately lined up. Again, this is very simple to achieve and helps in guiding the visitor's eye and holding their attention, as well as keeping your site looking smart and organised.

This also gives your website a more professional feel – images that are scattered randomly will be more difficult for visitors to follow. Consequently, you lose their attention, and as a result, could lose their custom.

Aligning your images is an economical use of the space on your website. This leaves you with more room for any other important text or graphics that must be included on your site.

There are other things you can do to enhance the impact of your website's images. However, animated photo galleries, borders and aligning are the three really effective ways to improve the images on your site.

Peter White is employed by Serif, a leading developer of software for home and small business users. Serif produces a range of software for photo editing, from fully-featured photo editing software for businesses and the experienced photographers to a free picture editor for home users.