The cornerstone of your digital marketing strategy should be an effecitve website that truly serves as a spotlight on your brand. Quality photographs can quickly and easily upgrade the overall aesthetic of your site, and the best part? Doing so requires minimal cost and skill.
Using the right images will:
- Make your products more desirable and appealing.
- Present your company (and yourself) as more professional, credible, and trustworthy.
- Make your website seem more expensive, which translates into the perception of better quality for your consumers.
- Boost engagement – According to Entrepreneur.com, blog posts that include images produce 650 percent higher engagement than text-only posts. So, why would you use low-quality, generic images?
Tips For Picking The Best Images
Here are a few of our expert tips for picking the best images to make your website truly dazzle.
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- Select images that are the right size for what you need:
Using file sizes that are too small will cause your images to look fuzzy and pixelated when expanded to fit the space you’re filling on your website, and that’s not going to dazzle anyone who clicks to your site! However, if you upload files that are too large, you could slow down the speed of your page, and that’s also not good, especially from an SEO standpoint. - Use images with faces.
Marketing experts know that people are naturally drawn to faces, and people will pay extra attention to an ad with a model who looks directly at them. - Use unique images.
Stock images are a great option (and we’ll go over where to find them next!), but the worst pictures you can pick are the ones that everyone else is using! You don’t want your website to look like everyone else’s, so why would you pick the same boring stock photos everyone else uses? If possible, hire a photographer to take high-quality, unique images for your site. The best images are ones that look real and are candid, as they’ll help your customers feel more connected to you and your brand.
- Select images that are the right size for what you need:
Legal and illegal use of images
You must be aware if an image you love is even available for you to legally use. The last thing any business owner wants is to find themselves in trouble for stealing someone else’s work. Here’s a quick look into the most common licenses that you will see for images:
- Public Domain:
These images can be used any way you see fit because the intellectual property rights have expired, or the owner has released them to the public free of charge. - Creative Commons:
These licenses can vary, but are typically free for you to use as long as you give proper credit to the owner of the image, and keep the image in its original form. - Royalty-Free:
Once you purchase the image, you are free to use the image as many times as you wish. - Rights-Managed:
This means that an image can be used a limited amount of times, and any usage beyond the limited amount will come at a cost.
If you’re in doubt about whether or not an image can be used, it’s always better to be safe than sorry. Simply contact the owner of the image or the service providing the image to inquire about how the image can be used.
Places to find images
So, where to find high-quality images for your website and blog?
Here’s our list of top 5 places to look:
- Flickr: Flickr has billions of images – yes, BILLIONS. And a vast percentage of images have been released under the Creative Commons Attribution license, which means the images can be used on your website as long as you give the original photographer proper credit.
- Unsplash: If you’re looking for beautiful, high-quality images taken by extremely talented photographers, Unsplash is where you want to look. The photos aren’t created for commercial purposes, so the images are often best for page backgrounds, headers, and the like.
- Shutterstock: Shutterstock is a paid image resource with a wide range of photos and graphics to choose from. If you don’t want to pay a monthly subscription fee, Shutterstock is a good option for when you do need images as you can purchase credits and use them toward whichever images you want.
- Rawpixel: For commercial purposes, Rawpixel is an excellent resource that’s free to use (but you do need to sign up with an email). No matter your business niche, you can easily find images with context to use for your website on Rawpixel, which help communicate what your business is all about.
- Pixabay: Pixabay is an expansive directory of free public domain photographs, vectors, and drawings.
Whether you’re looking to build a new website or you’re looking to refresh your existing site, Inception Web Design can help so you don’t have to worry about spending hours selecting the perfect images! One of our favorite parts about what we do is customizing each website build for each client, and we’d love to have a conversation with you about your vision for your company’s website. We invite you to read more about our website design services, and be sure to check out some of our favorite projects. When you’re ready, schedule your free 30 minute consultation.
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