I chose one of my favorite sites to examine.
Nintendo.com
It seemed to me that the images were a vital integration of the site itself. It contained eighteen images, one of the being the “banner image” which actually combined several images through a slide show highlighting new and innovative Nintendo products. Unfortunately I was not able to get the dimensions on this banner.
The other seventeen images serve purposes such as, advertisement, information and visual characteristics. The ranged in size from
-width of 40 px by 71 px, -width 218 px by 165 px -width 224 px by 190 px -width 140 px by 134 px and width 200 px by 40 px
While images are disabled you can still navigate the site but without the images enabled it’s nearly impossible to know what they are speaking off without the visual data. Unless you hover your mousse over the blank space you cannot really tell what you are looking at.
Conclusion
Visual images produce an understanding to the products they represent. Lack of imagery tends to a boring site.
I suggest using the Image Information option of your Web Developer toolbar. You will get a very different number of images on the homepage of the site and you will also be able to see the image dimensions. That being said, you don’t need to report the image dimensions for this assignment. We are more interested in the images sizes, referring to the size on disk.
I agree with you that images really play a key role making websites visually appealing, but what if you would someone with a visual impairment? How would you navigate the Web differently? Do you think images would play as important a role, or do you think you might be primarily concerned with finding content?