OK, the people creating the sites are called designers, but it is still their technological prowess, the graphical tricks they can do, that is the measure of their ability. It is not the images that are losing out. It is the words. Look at the top ten websites visited by UK surfers according to online researcher Media Metrix . It is entirely filled with sites that have virtually no graphics on their opening pages.
Research involving individual surfers points the same way.
But the principal form of content is text. Another piece of research, this time by the prestigious Stanford Poynter Institute in the United States, tracks users' eyeballs and finds that they go straight to text on a page rather than the more obvious graphics or adverts. The lessons from this are not being learned by most website owners. Recently, for instance, my television gave up the ghost and I decide to buy a new one. All the major electrical retailers have websites with illustrations of their products.