In web site design similiarly to life, it isn't always obvious what is most important. Marketing people feel graphics in web design make a web page more effective, programmers feel its the functionality and textual content; this argument goes back and forth. So who should break this opinion tie - the audience. And the most important audience is Google, because if you don't have Google or other search engines then you don't have the human audience either - no ifs, ands or buts.
At times I'll look up a web page in a text-only browser. This is just to see how they offer information to text-only devices, or when I am trying to get information that I truely want about a specific event or business product or service without having to crawl my way through a bunch of graphics.
In these text-only travels one sees web pages in a true accessibility mode. A mode that is accessible to both human and machine. Remember that the Internet is adolescent and we are only now starting to have web-active devices that can automatically mine the Internet on our behalf as we interact with them - such as refrigerators, global position locators. Much more is forthcoming as the web matures.
Imagine if the web were mostly animations or graphic picturess. Such would make it very extremely difficult for your GPS (such as GM OnStar) to perform proximity searches when looking for a hotel for example. There are hundreds of examples here now and likely thousands that we have yet no way of knowing about within our future. A strictly graphics oriented web page always finishes last in any race to disseminate information.
I've always said, for a web site to be fully accessible, it should be capable of browsing with by a braille reader. Some people would say - i'm not selling to the blind so why should I keep my web site so accessible?" Why? Because the most powerful Internet force visits your web pages like blind people - Google! Google is blind and reads web pages linearly as the code is sent to the retrieved, it then tries to interpret what it sees.
Google doesn't give a middle finger about how pretty pages looks in Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Safari, or any other web browser. Google cares about the content, links to your site, TITLE tags, and so much more that an entire industry has evolved trying to figure out what Google likes and dislikes.
A successful web site is always one that Google likes, it doesn't matter if you spend a million dollars on cute graphics and Flash animations. Our web site for example scores well with Google and we get compliments about it every day, yet some complain that it should be more visual and less textual. The graphics versus text design argument continues - but hybrid graphic and text-based web page continue to score best.
Google-ize your web site and you will acheive a higher page ranking which translates to users. Let your competition spend thousands on cute graphics design and watch as 90% of the market web traffic comes to you. Text is how Google views the web and Google is the king - so don't @#$% him off.
Steven McEachern - October 2004
