A Picture Worth A Thousand Words : How To Choose Great Photos For Your Site
You’ve probably heard this quote about a million times: “A picture is worth a thousand words”. When choosing images for your site, this statement couldn’t be more true. While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, don’t select any pretty picture to go to your site. Think about what you want to say with your photos and how these photos tell a story about your brand.
Want to make the right impression with your photos? Here are some tips to help you out!
1) Choose relevant photography that aligns with your website’s purpose.
As you choose the photos for your website, take a second to think about the purpose of your site and who the audience is. Typically your photos should speak to your target audience while tying into what your business is. Users tend to make a lot of assumptions about images without reading its correlating copy. Choose images that communicate the message you’re trying to convey.
2) Is It Useful?
Choose photos that are simple, self-explanatory, and effectively communicate what the product, service, or site is all about. Photos can help enhance a user’s understanding of your product, so think about the context of the photo: does it help them understand something? Does it teach the user how to use the product? How does it apply to the user or their business?
3) Quality Matters.
One of the golden rules of choosing images is to choose high-quality images. Having small, grainy, and pixelated images on a site can be annoying to downright infuriating depending on your audience. While high-quality images tend to be large, there are numerous image compression sites and programs that can reduce the file size so it doesn’t slow your site down or eat up memory.
When working with images, an important tip is to not stretch the photo. This will destroy the quality of the image. Keep in mind, you can always crop the image to make it smaller, but it’s harder to make a small image larger.
4) Don’t just Google It.
While Google makes it easy to find images, it doesn’t mean that they are free to use and the majority of them are copyrighted. Unless you have permission from the original owner or hold the license that grants the permission for you to use that image, the Google image cannot be used under any circumstances. If you’re caught using a copyrighted image from Google, companies can take legal action against you for unauthorized use of their material and demand a high settlement fee.
5) Use unique photos for your site.
Stand out from the crowd and use your company’s own branded photography. Using actual pictures of your staff, office space, and product shots that tell a story about your brand. If you have to use stock images, not all images are created equal. Expensive stock sites offer pictures with better quality, natural-looking images while cheaper stock image sites tend to have pictures that are more cheesy and artificial. Another great option is using royalty free images which allows you to use the image for free, even for commercial use.
Interested in making the right first impression? Find out how Web Toaster can help you!
