Graphics as content?

I am sitting here, freshly woken up at a time when nothing good is on, and I saw an interesting sounding show on Prairie Public Television called Dot.Com, which is the furthest thing from high tech most of the time. Well, they are talking about creating your own web site, locally taped and generally informative. I like how the guest said that the site you want always depends on what you want to do with it. He then got on to the topic of graphics, and he pointed out two sites, one of an art gallery, and they use graphics a lot to show their product. Then he showed the IRS web site which uses graphics sparsely, and those that are there are merely for decoration. I had a theory at the point when he mentioned the art gallery, and I want to present it here.

As he said, and I have said before, graphics can be both good, and bad, depending on the site. So, the question, put simpler, is whether the site will be text content, or graphical content. Most site, I will say, should not be graphical content, unless you are selling something that requires graphical explanation, i.e.: words simply cannot be used to describe the item. This is where Amazon misses it. They seem to think that every item, from a book to a Linksys Router needs a graphical representation. While they have been smart and limited their pages to few other images, and the item images are small in bytes, it is still not really necessary for a lot of their items. What I am saying it, their site is not one that should use graphics as the content. They can do much more with words.

This site, as you can tell, is a textual content site. My words are the draw, the usefulness, and the reason people come. eBay people come for the auctions, and only when you read an auction, usually, do you see the images, which can be elaborate, plentiful, and large. They also do the pure design aspect right. Now, if only they could make the sellers and buyers more reliable... Anyways, my theory is that these two different kinds of sites, textual and graphical content, cannot be mixed without ruining the idea of the site, and the message. I mean that yes, a textual content site can have graphics, as mine does, but they should be sparse and not rely on a graphical browser to get a message across.

With a graphical site, one that is based or relies heavily on the graphical side of a site, there need not be much text, but it is important to make sure that you do not use graphics as your content too often, because it will eventually lead to a site that is clunky, unusable, and text browser unfriendly, and yes, there are still those that use Lynx and other text browsers, not to mention the blind who will find your pretty graphical site useless and unfriendly. The message I am trying to get across is that while graphical content is good, and Flash is good for some uses, both have and can be perverted to make them useless and clunky. Graphics are good, and may be good for showing a product a little better, but if you use it too much, the site will become worthless, no matter the cost.