How To Overcome Problems In Creating Website Graphics

A professional webmaster such as myself has to have a wide range of skills involving website design. We are expected to be able to cope with all the tasks needed to maintain websites. Naturally, some of these skills are more easily mastered than others.

One Major Skill Problem

Many webmasters such as myself find that the creation of website graphics is one of the hardest tasks to do well. Artistic ability is something you are born with, not something you can easily acquire. Yes, the best graphics software makes the job a little easier but software such as PhotoShop is both costly and not easy to master.

The general lack of graphics skills is very evident when you look at the many websites built by amateurs. They really haven’t grasped the importance of having a well-presented website. If they are selling something, they are unlikely to gain the confidence of potential customers. Would you buy from a person who cannot present a professional appearance on their website? Probably not!

The Importance Of Website Graphics

It is important for the content of a website to be easily read, and this can partially be achieved by breaking up the text with well-placed and appropriate images. This is as important on blogs and content-rich sites as it is with selling websites. People will soon leave if the site cannot be easily and quickly read.

Good quality images are also important to give a clear picture of something that it being sold on a website. Even if it is a digital product, delivered electronically, an image of a book cover or a software box can greatly increase the chance of making a sale.

Hiring A Graphic Designer

There will be times when it is necessary to pay for graphic design if you need very professional looking images. But you’ll need to be prepared to wait, sometimes weeks, for the work to be completed.

Finding a good graphic designer can be a challenge. You need to ensure that they have the skills to produce website graphics, not just off-line graphics. And look carefully at their style. Does it appeal to you. Every designer has their own style and you need to find one whose style you like. Check the sort of work that they have done. And check, also, that they can do the work in time for you. Some designers are very busy and they could end up delaying the launch of your product or site.

Using Pre-Made Graphics

There is no shortage of freely available images on the web - such as buttons, bullets, headers, icons and photographs.

One problem with ready-made graphics is that, because they are freely available, many people will use them on their sites. So if you use the same ones, experienced visitors to your site will recognise that you are using free resources. This can create an image which is less than professional. With the right skills and graphics software it is possible to modify these ready-made images to give a more unique look to your website. But I find that this is both challenging and time consuming, and I guess that other people will as well.

Also, it can be quite hard to track down the good sources of ready-made graphics. A lot of the stuff on the web is pure rubbish!

How I Solved The Problem Of Creating Website Graphics

I’ve spent a lot of time since starting as a webmaster in 1996 locating good website graphics resources on the web. But I’ve been excited recently to locate a growing number of services on the web which are far more sophisticated than the old collections of pre-made graphics and photo collections.

I’ve been amazed at what you can do with some of these web- based services. You can design things such as banner headers, badges and buttons without difficulty. You can apply all sorts of effects to photographs. You can manipulate existing images as if you were using a top-end graphics program. You can even design templates for both websites and blogs. There’s a lot more - and I’m regularly finding new online services of this kind

And they are all completely free!

For my own convenience, I took the best of these graphics services and wrapped them up in a bit of software which I can easily access. And the software can be updated easily, so that I can add new graphics services as I find them

I passed a few copies of this software out to a few close friends to see what they thought of it. Their reaction was “Wow!! You could make a packet selling this”. Well, I didn’t particularly want to make “a packet” because I wanted to make it affordable to most “graphically-challenged” webmasters. So, when I added it to my “Webmasters CheatKit product range, I kept the price low, and it’s become hugely successful.