A lot of people don’t work with photography for a living, but know that creating the right pictures for their website is crucial to making a great first impression. It’s not only about finding stock photos but about choosing the correct ones and tailoring them to your needs. The cold hard truth is that when people choose the wrong pictures for their websites, they face big challenges.
Here are some of them:
- Seeing the pictures they decided on appear everywhere.
- Creating a page that doesn’t chime with the overall brand.
- Wasting cash on pictures they aren’t going to use over the long haul.
- Experiencing legal problems because they didn’t abide by the regulations.
Do these sound like problems you want to bump into? Or are you, like most others, simply trying to expand your company, produce great content, and help your customers?
Naturally, it’s possible to invest in professional stock photos. Like the online Teoriprøven from Bestått.no, have amazing animated photos.
However, if you don’t have the funding to do that at the moment, then there are some simple things you can do to make your pictures pop.
Here are five tips for how to use stock photos on your website for a great first impression.
Begin with Design
Before doing anything else, think about the design you want for your page. You can imagine your website as being a pyramid you’re constructing, and the photos are the pharaoh treasures inside. The treasures are important, but they won’t be the only thing deciding how your website will appear.
These are some of the things that go into the design:
- Picture size
- Picture angles
- Kinds of pictures
When you’ve locked in your design, it becomes a piece of cake to focus your gaze and choose the right pictures for your website. It’s best to know your preferences before you invest any money in your project.
Decide on the Correct Pictures
Pick stock photos that are on par with the colors you have in your brand and your style.
Don’t just pick pictures that appear fantastic but don’t resonate with your brand. Begin with the end (your brand) in mind. When you’ve done this, you won’t swerve from the right path of choosing pictures that will actually look good on your website.
It doesn’t matter if the pictures are beautiful; if they don’t match your brand, your followers won’t be able to distinguish your unique personality and color style from that of everybody else, and it will all be very confusing for them.
Of course, we also have to mention some of the regulations around pictures you find on the internet:
Before you use any photo you find, you have to be certain that your use goes in line with the usage rights for that specific photo. You need to be aware of whether you are allowed to use them to market your website, and how you are supposed to give credit to the person who published the picture.
Tailor Your Pictures
A thing which makes this whole process a lot more interesting is that you can tailor your pictures by using overlays and text, and by cropping them to fit your needs.
Here are some suggestions for how you can tailor your pictures to make a great first impression:
- Add overlays in colors that match your logo.
- Use text to make a unique look or taggable pictures.
- Crop your pictures in different ways to get more out of them.
- Insert your services into the pictures to show what you’re offering.
By making use of these tips in your own stock pictures, you will be able to make pictures that your audience will identify as uniquely yours, even if you didn’t take them in the first place!
Optimize Your SEO
Make your pictures ready for good SEO so more people can find your content on the internet.
Most of the time, stock photos have name tags that refer to the brand or the person who took the picture. When you buy and download a picture, remember to give it a new name which improves the SEO of your website. This is because using a name that points to a completely another person (the one who took the picture) or company, won’t help you at all.
Ensure Your Own Pictures
If you blend in some of your own pictures into your stock photos, you’ll be able to use stock photos to add some flair to your website while also making a look that is uniquely yours.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a complete amateur or a great photographer. Rørlegger Bergen – a plumber in Bergen, Norway used just their iPhone to capture some decent pictures for their website.
Using stock photos on your website is a really smart way for making a great first impression on the people who come to visit. And when they do come, they will be astonished.