Photos and images are a powerful tool on the web, and the ability to create an image gallery is a regularly requested feature. However, we don't support or recommend image galleries on our sites for several reasons:
- Pages featuring only or primarily images are not easily searchable. Search engines will not often find a page without textual content and context. Clear context is essential for ensuring that the content is valuable and properly representing the University. Images without clearly designated context may be misused or misunderstood.
- Purely image-based content does not provide value to most visitors of ISU sites. The content your website serves should be in service to another goal, whether that's informing users about research, publicizing events, raising money or awareness, attracting students to a program, or something else. A gallery of images alone does not often shepherd visitors toward that goal.
- Platforms like Flickr or Instagram are a better home for purely image-based content than your website.
Instead, we recommend that you place your images alongside engaging written content. Images are extremely valuable to break up your text, draw attention, increase engagement, and provide detail and context to written content. Take the best images you're considering for a gallery and spread them out across other relevant content where it can have the most impact.
We've provided tools allowing you to easily place images directly into your content and format it alongside your text. You can learn more about how to do this in our images tutorial.