Images and Medical Website Design
Posted: Aug 26 in Blogging tagged Medical Website Design by PeterThe use of images in a medical website is somewhat of a catch-22. On one hand, a doctor’s website should provide great content to its visitors, and pictures do just that. Magazines and newspapers rely on pictures all the time to get a story to their readers, so it’s easy to see why pictures are so useful in medical website development. On the other hand, pictures can also get in the way of your website’s purpose. They can be distracting and can cause the loading time of your pages to increase.
Even with their drawbacks, images have a place in medical website design. Here are just a few of the benefits of using images on your site:
- Pictures get the reader’s attention
- They simplify the explanation of complicated medical procedures and issues
- They tend to be more memorable than text
Images are definitely worthwhile, they just need to be used correctly. Some simple tips for properly using images on your medical website are:
- Use JPEG files when possible. They’re smaller and take less time to load but also provide a wide palette of colors.
- Avoid animated GIFs. These might give an unprofessional appearance to a physician website.
- Optimize your images for search engines. Use keywords in the image file names, ALT tags, and descriptions.
- Don’t overdo it. Not only will too many images cause your page to load much more slowly, but it will take away from the rest of your medical website content.