Oops! Deleted original content!

Since this is a community about learning and sharing, I thought I'd share a hard-earned lesson, and ask for a little advice.

I started a website at the end of February. More than half of my pages had about two graphics a piece that I created. After a couple weeks, I turned a critical eye to the graphics. They looked amateurish. They lost quality when I turned them into JPEGs from PowerPoint. They just weren't creating the look and feel on my website that I was going for. Up to that point, my pages were ranking anywhere from Google Page 2 to Google Page 6, on average.

And then, I deleted my graphics and I really liked the clean look of my webpages.

My Google Page Rankings started sinking like stones! I'm talking from Page 4 to Page 15, then 16, then 18 and falling.

My best guess is that Google considered those graphics to be original, and therefore helpful, content. None of my competitors had those graphics. I'm going to make better graphics and put them back in my content!

Two questions for you:

1. Do you think that when I deleted the graphics it caused my page rankings to plummet?

2. Is there a better file format to use for web graphics besides JPEGs for better quality and clarity?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Alyssa