Updating the images on your website will always be a part of a complete update and, sometimes, it’s a good update to take on independently of updating your entire site. There are plenty of reasons to consider this. When you consider the reasons why you might want to update the images on your website, you’ll understand what types of updates generally do work for websites.

Resolution Problems
Image resolution is a huge consideration for graphic designers. Images that were produced many years ago may not display very well on today’s very advanced displays. If you want an analogy that will help you understand why, it’s not hard to come up with one. Imagine that you went to an art gallery and didn’t wear glasses to correct your nearsightedness. Imagine the difference if you went to the gallery wearing your glasses. The difference in crispness on today’s high-resolution displays – both on desktop computers and on mobile devices – is as significant as the difference in that analogy. Images that were designed for displays that were up to the standards of 10 years ago are not likely to be very impressive on today’s monitors.

One great way to update the images on your website is to have a graphic designer redesign them in a way that makes them more attractive on today’s displays. In the process, graphic designers will oftentimes correct minor problems with the images and just make them a lot more attractive by using their aesthetic abilities.

Sizes
You’ve probably heard the term responsive design used in reference to websites. This means that the design is fluid and that it can change to accommodate different screen sizes. With so many mobile devices in use today, this is a necessary feature. Before responsive design became the next big thing, however, fixed-width designs were the convention. These are designs that retain their dimensions on the screen, no matter what type of screen resolution the visitor is using. They worked very well for the pre-mobile world.

It is possible to make images that can resize dynamically. Images that are set up this way can displayed beautifully in any size. Right now, scalable vector graphics are what designers are looking at to accommodate this need. Replacing your logo, core images and other image content with scalable vector graphics might be something your web designer recommends and it is most certainly a recommendation that you should take seriously.

Colors
If you’re having images touched up, have a graphic designer look at the colors. Graphic designers have much more precise and powerful tools than they had available in the past and they can oftentimes revamp an image so that it is visually stunning, even if it was mediocre to begin with. If you have an image gallery of your products or your personnel and the pictures look a little bit outdated, see if your graphic designer can give them a little bit more visual appeal. Having a gallery redone in this way is a great website update that doesn’t require you to go through the entire process of redesigning your website from scratch.

Navigation Menus
There aren’t many websites that are still using them but, at one time, navigation menus that utilized images for the links were very popular. These are bad ideas from a search engine optimization standpoint and their bad ideas from a usability standpoint. If you still have these types of images on your website, talk to your web designer about what they can do to improve that situation. You’ll likely be very surprised at what they can do for you these days and it will make your website easier for the search engines to read and for your visitors to navigate.

Matt Dandurand is the CEO of MediaContour.com, offering web design in Los Angeles, CA.