Graphics In Your Church Website Design

Graphics in Your Church Website Design

Using graphics in your church website design is very important and are the basis for first impressions. The Internet has become what many call the “Information Highway.” This is true for your website as well as the design you incorporate into the site. 

Graphics are the pictorial information to a website. A visitor can view a website, see the pictures and decide if they want to continue viewing or move on to the next website. Before incorporating graphics into your church website design, there is one major decision to be made: Is your designer comfortable creating their own graphics or would they rather use graphics that were designed by someone else? Sometimes graphics are difficult to create. Their beauty and how they blend in with your page design makes creating them even harder. Therefore your designer should decide this quandary himself. 

Obtaining graphics from a clipart library is the easiest way to incorporate graphics into your church website design. Clipart libraries give you the choice of design, color and size that fits your website. A two-inch set of praying hands would be an eyesore on a page with tiny doves and a large photo of your church. Therefore choosing the correct size of graphics is important as well. Make sure they are eye catching but not overpowering to the page.

Many of the programs used in designing web pages include a clipart library. If yours does not, you can always log onto the Internet and do a search for graphics and clipart. There is a multitude of free clipart websites that allows you to download all the clipart you want. 

Another possibility is obtaining permission from the owner of another website to use some of their clipart. If you are browsing a website and see the perfect graphic for your design, it is possible to contact the owner of the website and ask permission to use that design. Obtaining permission is important for several reasons: The owner of the site may not be the owner of the graphics, the graphics designer may have these graphics copyrighted and use of them without express consent could be a violation of copyright laws, and finally, the graphic may have been used from another designer who has copyrights to it.

Another way of adding graphics is by taking pictures yourself and editing them to fit your needs. Digital cameras afford the designer the ability to create their own graphics by snapping a picture of the graphic they want and then editing it to fit their page. A good example is: Taking a picture of a Bible then cropping and resizing it could give the perfect graphic for your needs. 

Whether you design your own graphics or use a clipart library, the usefulness of graphics on a church website design has become common practice and separates the “ok” websites from the “great” websites. Consider using graphics on your web pages to set your sight apart from all the others. You won’t be sorry you did.

About the Author

Lynne Gabriel is the owner of TheChurchWebsiteDesigners.com – a church website design company based in Houston, TX. They build custom church website design that are visually-appealing, user-friendly, and easy-to-manage.

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