The really early days of the web were all about text. The object of the whole exercise was to make what is surely the most basic type of information, streams of bytes representing characters, available to a wide audience. To do this that information has to be in a format which is as much as possible, "device independent". Text is a very lightweight way of conveying information. A small 143px by 143px image can easily run to 4500 bytes, which at a byte a character is the equivalent of about 900 words. A picture may indeed paint a thousand words in the real world, but in the virtual world a lot of users will thank you for not taking up all their bandwidth.
But this is to digress from the main point, which is that the web began life as a medium for conveying information in as succinct and lightweight a manner as possible. During its period of explosive growth we lost sight of this a bit, but it's now an idea which is coming back. At lots of sites, for example intranets, news and information services and so on, it actually never went away. The important point to be made is that good web designers should be able to make text oriented pages appear enticing, interesting and most of all readable, without relying too heavily on bandwidth intensive images and animations, which also tend to reduce the usability and accessibility of pages. A significant challenge to designers and implementers of web sites is to present text based information in the most accessible