When designing webpages it is important to cover all aspects of design. Content and text is of course very important. But, the visual content is just as imperative to the overall design of the site as well. Visuals are a quick way to draw in interested parties to the site and keep their attention.
What is visual content?
Before going further into the details we should cover exactly what visual content is. Visual content is a further way of communicating the information to visitors. This is a concept humans have been using over thousands of years via cave paintings, paintings and film. The theme is consistent throughout history, telling better stories with visuals.
Quite often visual content will transmit the information better and faster than any other medium. Visitors don’t need to spend time reading through lengthy paragraphs but can simply acquire the information at a glance. There are even some statistics on the ways that the human brain can actually even process images faster than text. In fact a huge 65% of people are visual learners. Videos gain more attention on social media sites than do text pieces. And this is consistent for other types of visual marketing such as infographics etc. as well.
Creating good visual content
Of course, it is all well and good to know that a site needs visuals to enhance it, but to get the right visuals is key. Like anything on a site, bad visuals can break a reputation almost instantly. There are a few different types of visuals to look for and these include images, videos, infographics, memes, presentations and screenshots. A well-designed site will not simply utilise all of these but rather choose the options that most suit the specific need. An overload of graphics can be just as detrimental as a lack of them.
There are a few easy tips to follow that will make some of the content much more interactive to visitors. For instance, all images should be highly relevant to the text and enhance the text rather than take away from it. Videos too can be highly informative but make sure they are not too long. In this day and age it seems that the attention span of the average person has actually dropped to as low as eight seconds. Videos should catch and hold interest in this period of time to be of any use.
There are many more options available but this is just a few of many ways to help make your site interesting and effective.