Website photography can be a make-or-break element of your website’s tone and style, ensuring your company appears professional, relatable, trustworthy, and above all, genuine — bye, bye stock photos of cheesy grins and handshakes!
But it’s often a task we all shy away from — after all we’re not pro photographers! But you don’t need to be! 2023 is fast-becoming the year that shows that as marketers, and professionals we all have to be adaptable and have multiple skills to reflect the changing times. So if you need fresh site photography fast, or you’re working with a low budget, so a pro photographer isn’t an option, start with the following advice:
There are three areas of your site that are absolutely critical in regards to having photography:
- Team/About
- Services/Products
- Blog/Resources
If needs be, the rest of your site can be text-only, and that is a popular design style at the moment, so you’d get away with a minimal image-free design elsewhere.
With that in mind, here’s our advice for these core areas:
Team/About
As a novice photographer ensure you have a consistent setup, don’t start with props and other complications — just keep it simple, a clean background and identical posing style for all of your team. Take the photos all in portrait mode rather than regular mode, and make sure you make the most of the ’rule of thirds’.
Here’s examples of good team and about photos:
The iPhone allows you to take photos in Portrait Mode, meaning you can blur backgrounds and ‘get clever’ with your shots, so feel free to explore this option, but make sure everyone’s photo uses the same settings, to avoid confusion and conflict when they’re displayed on your website.
You can also use the iPhone’s editing capabilities, to overhaul the final appearance of your photos, including greyscaling your photos using — my preferred — Noir setting, amongst others.
In The Field Images
If you’re an service provider then undoubtedly the importance of action photography is vital to ensure you can sell your services. Take these photos using the basic settings of your iPhone, but remember for successfully photography the images need to be wider than normal. See below for good examples of in the field images we can use on your service pages:
These types of in the field images are perfect for your service pages because people want to see you next to your truck, house, business. It’s a personal connection that users are looking for and when they see in in the field, it makes the connection. And that’s where the magic happens!
Gallery/Resources Images
This is the one area that you CANT get away without using genuine photography! People on the internet want to see YOU and YOUR BUSINESS. They don’t want to see generic stock images in your resources or gallery section of the website.
Here’s some good examples of images for the blog and resources sections of your site:
We can also high quality free stock photography from sites like Pexels, Pixabay and Burst by Shopify, to create eye-catching visuals for Gallery/Resources content however it’s always best to use original images as they stand out!
For your Gallery/Resources images, we can start small with 5-10 images and build it up over time. Don’t get caught up in taking the perfect pictures, just get started and go from there!
