Using Images to Tell Your Story
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The Internet has come into its own as a visual medium, with entire sites devoted to still images and video. When searchers look for information or entertainment, they've come to want a little eye candy along with all those lines of text. What are some of the best ways to give them what they want?
Just a quick heads-up: I expect to jump back and forth between theory and practice in this article. For a long time, I didn't use images in my articles at all; then I learned how to take screen shots, and realized how much they enhanced my search engine and web site reviews. I also learned just enough about taking pictures with digital cameras to get some good images for a monitor review on Dev Hardware. I still have a lot to learn, of course, but that seems to be the nature of technology in general.
I'll start with something simple for those of you who might still be resistant to the idea of adding images to your blog. Maybe you've seen really crowded MySpace pages and you don't want your site to look so cluttered. Why should you use images?
Images convey ideas in ways that words can't. If you're doing a review of a particular item, as I hinted at above, there's nothing quite like showing the item you're reviewing from several angles to give the right impression. If you're writing a how-to piece, images will help your readers understand exactly what they need to do if they want to duplicate your results. If you're talking about a company's or an industry's economic outlook, images – in the form of charts and graphs – can show where it has been, and where you expect it to go.
You practically can't sell anything online without images. It doesn't matter if what you're selling is intangible (like software), potential buyers want to see it – the box it comes in, screen shots of the software in action, etc. For example, I used to be an active buyer and seller on eBay about six or seven years ago; even back then, it was always the listings with images that got the most traffic. As a buyer, they were the ones I looked for; as a seller, I knew I wouldn't do as well without an image, though at the time I had little choice since I lacked the skills.
Even if you're not specifically selling something, you will attract more traffic with images. Visitors like seeing images; they break up all those lines of text and help convey a mood or support what you're saying. So, now that you know the why, just how do you add images?
Photo courtesy of FreeFoto.com (http://www.freefoto.com/).
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