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Well that was interesting. I'm just out of a meeting with my partner and a couple of small business people and we were discussing some images that they wanted to have added to their website and I discovered something I hadn't thought about before.

We were looking at two images that were going to be used to sell a product on the business people's website. There was nothing really wrong with the images ... the lighting was good, the subject plainly the center of attention in the photos and even though the photos had been taken with a fairly cheap digital camera the image quality was fine.

Despite all those positive things there was just something about the images that didn't really impress any of us ... not even the person who took the photos. There was just something intangible about them that made them seem less appealing than they should have been.

Then my partner suggested that we flip one of the images horizontally and turn the other through 90 degrees (yes it was still going to work) and suddenly the images looked totally different. Everything about the images was still the same but suddenly they just looked so much better.

With just one slight change two images that had been fairly ordinary and bland suddenly became what we wanted them to be.

Now obviously here in adult we're not going to be able to do all that much with the images we use for our galleries and free sites but what about the images that we use for gallery or site design? Are they facing in the right direction?

Are the images that you're using in your site design drawing a visitor's focus to what is important or are they looking away from the important stuff and maybe even focusing attention on something that's not even on the site?

And what about your site or gallery template design in general. Is it working for you or has it been something of a flop? Have your sales risen since you introduced your latest template or have they fallen ... even just a little?

If your sales have dropped away ... even just a little ... while everything else remains equal perhaps there's something wrong with the template itself. Does it add to the sales message that you're trying to convey to your surfers or does it subtract from message?

Does your latest template design actually add to the excitement or is it doing the opposite and encouraging your surfers to go somewhere else for the excitement that they're looking for?

Making the right decision when it comes to design and templates can be a hard call because what looks perfectly fine to us can look less than inspiring to many other people. It can also be a hard call because we may have invested a lot of time, thought and effort into the design and when we do that it's hard to be objective about anything.

But if it's not working then obviously something is wrong and it would be foolish to ignore that fact. So what things might be wrong with the design of a template?

Well we've already discussed images and how they can have a negative impact simply because they're facing the wrong way or not facing an important message that you really do want to get across. And there are other things that can slip into a design that can act as block sales.

Have you used any horizontal lines in the template? These would be lines that you might have used as separators to compartmentalize parts of your page.

If you have used lines in that way then try removing them because lines are a clear block to the eye as a surfer scans your page. Sure people do move past those lines but they skip over what might be immediately below those lines and if you have an important marketing message just below those lines then it will get missed.

Does the general design of your template allow people to easily scan from top to bottom? Sometimes when there are lots of things like banners and broad images that easy flow of the eye can be broken so badly that people leave rather than trying to find their way to the bottom.

Sometimes view blocks can be useful and they can increase your sales but sometimes they have the opposite effect and they can do a lot of damage.

And then sometimes a template design can just look wrong for no obvious reason. When that happens maybe you can try flipping it horizontally but more often than not you just need to throw it in the trash and start from scratch.