They say a picture holds a thousand words, and in the currency of the internet and mobile access, this is gold-dust. When it comes to web design, many underestimate the importance and power of good photographs. However, if you have the right collection of images, your website will come to life and tell your story for you.
What’s in a photograph anyway?
With so many free image sites around, or sites which allow you to edit your own images, some people feel a bit ambivalent to hiring a photographer to come and take some photographs for their own website. True, this will cost you more initially when creating or updating a website, but the long term benefits of having these images are far greater that the cost of a photographer. For instance, if you have a library of your own images, you can easily update or refresh the images on your site as you see fit. Before this even, you can set out a photo shoot to detail exactly the look and feel you want your business to portray, rather than having to rely on a loose match from available photographs.
You can also re-purpose these images in social media, blog posts, sending out to press, and many other marketing initiatives which can save you time and effort overall. This can also mean you avoid any imaging rights issues when it comes to blogs and social media. With your own photographs, you have more freedom over your online branding.
In addition to image freedom, you also have something that’s personal to your business. Your products or services displayed in your location, in the way you wish them to be displayed, offers a more humanising insight to your business. Whether or not you choose to have team photography on your website, more personal touches tend to resonate more with potential customers or clients.
For example, if your business is selling a service, it can be easy to just use stock imagery to emphasise ‘training’ or even something as broad as ‘food’. However, it’s almost guaranteed that if you like an image on one of these free sites, someone else will be using it on their site or marketing, taking away the individual quality and selling point of your business.
In an increasingly noisy online world, people buy into brands they can trust. One way to do this is through offering transparency and personality in your web design. This can be easily created through powerful photography which is unique to your business.
For more information about photography, web design or any of the services fatBuzz provides, get in touch on 0141 427 0727 or email kyle@fatbuzz.com