The big picture and the little picture. The big picture of your home page is the cohesiveness of the design and the color. One of the job of the big picture is to make it easy to use the all the little pictures page elements. No matter how well a theme is designed, a website owner can break the cohesiveness and communication value of a home page.
Website viewers need a place to focus on when they first arrive at the site. Generally, that place will be an image, and it needs to be an image that communicates the message of the site. But, when a site has too many images, especially if they are of equal size, the images cause confusion, instead of being helpful. Sometimes the scope of a website is too broad for one image to communicate fully. Other times, a topic, such as technical services need to use images to narrowly define services.
One example is Montana Webmaster. I don’t fix printers. I don’t install networks, but I have to know something about web servers. I don’t do photography or graphic art, but I have to work with both. I have received requests to do all these services. Somehow, I need the images on my home page to illustrate the services I am qualified to provide. But, throwing all these images on the page won’t help much because of the image noise.
In the process of trying out a new theme for MontanaWebmaster.com, I found myself with an image explosion. The combination of the banner slider and the 4 images below it are just too noisy to pick out a focal point.
So, I will try for photos in the second row to be more towards gray scale. Experimentation will let me know how close to black and white I have to get.