Clever Site Design - Image is Everything

The quality of the images you choose to use on your site makes the difference between your site popping or flopping. It’s like a children’s book. The reader will flick through and look at the pictures first, and only when they’re content that everything looks good will they decide to read on, so it’s important to get it right.

You don’t have to be a pro photographer to get great images either. In a few week’s time I’m going to guide you through how to achieve great results with your own product photography, but what about the other images you use on your site?

Well, you have a number of options.



You could go to a stock photo site like Shutterstock or Fotolia, where you’ll be able to search for good quality images of all kinds of things. The good thing about these kind of sites is that they have banks full of thousands and thousands of images, taken by photographers all over the world, and you can usually find something very suitable. These sites tend to sell credits, which allow you to download a certain number of images. You probably won’t need the full size image files, so this should be a fairly inexpensive exercise, and you’ll also be purchasing the right to use the image for advertising and web. (If you intend to use the image on anything that is going to be resold, such as a t-shirt or card, then you’ll need an extended licence.)





If you have very specific needs, maybe you could approach a professional or semi-professional photographer to take a series of shots for you? This is surely a more expensive option, but the advantage is that you’ll get exactly what you’re after. Perhaps try approaching the local student photography society (usually called something like photosoc) and commissioning someone to help you “on the cheap”.



Of course, you could take the images yourself? If you choose to do this, don’t be fooled into thinking that buying a big, expensive DSLR camera is going to help you. If you don’t know what you’re doing with it, then the chances are that the images will be worse than they would be if you used a compact point-and-shoot. Many of the consumer compact cameras are very very good these days. Just to prove my point, take a look at the Digital P&S Photo Club on Flickr.

If you’re taking portraits of staff, my advice would be don’t try and replicate the pros. Do something different. Try to capture the subject in their surroundings, whether this is a studio or their shop. It’ll tell the visitor more about your staff than a badly taken attempt at a studio portrait.

I hope that helps. If you're really stuck, I've done a product photography tutorial that I'll be releasing in 3 parts over the next few weeks. Stay tuned!

I look forward to seeing what you come up with!

Richard Heathcote
Marketing Monster
tweet me @rich_heathcote
richard.heathcote@frooly.com