jayeff

Why the implication that good design will only work for one or the other?

Graphics, text and white space are all components of a page and it is the way they are assembled, rather than their individual virtues, which impacts on a page's sales potential.

The dumbest thing I ever see is paragraphs of text, delivered as graphics. The page becomes slower, more expensive to deliver and throws away the chance to score with the SE's, for what, the sake of 5-10 minutes coding time?

That said, the issue isn't text vs graphics as such, but the wider one of understanding our own limitations. Recently for example, this board had a couple of flash-based promos on the front end and apparently no-one noticed that even someone who was slow on their mouse could click the link to get into the board before half the animation had finished loading. Perhaps they were the most convincing promos ever, but how many will never know?

We might like to imagine we are all experts at everything, but we are not and unless a webmaster is knowledgable about marketing and site usability, then he needs to hire a designer who is. Unfortunately, such designers do not generally come at the rates commonly advertised for adult designs. But if no-one has such knowledge, everyone involved ends up looking at a design as a picture (albeit one with a couple of prominent join links somewhere) and that simply isn't relevant.

Design is another area in which high demand has allowed us to make money despite ourselves, but what has been left on the table (or gone to someone else) over the past 10 years doesn't bear thinking about.