Text vs. images

Tuesday March 30, 2004, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)

Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

I bet I could come up with a usefulness score for a given web-page that's based on the ratio of number of images to number of words. I occasionally read articles about how people don't like to read large blocks of text and that it should be skimmable and blah blah blah--but in reality, I think if the ratio of images to text is high, then the page is making up for in visual appeal what it lacks in raw information.

I guess the issue is that I prefer sites that are more like books and encyclopedias than like marketing brochures.

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