Not every picture tells a story

I'm sorry if you spent hundreds of dollars on that stock photo. Or hours making that image look just right. Most of the time, your users don't care.

"In the case of Web design a picture isn’t always worth those thousand words… users treat pages with superfluous images like obstacle courses: The images create barriers to content."

Eyetrack studies, in which the movement of users' eyes are tracked to see where on a page they look, show that users are great at ignoring decorative imagery. Similar studies have found that users are first drawn to headlines, article summaries, and captions. They often do not look at the images at all until the second or third visit to a page. Print magazine and newspaper readers on the other hand, check out the photos first, then get on with reading.

Online, content is still king.