Do not underestimate how much of a difference having the right photos on your website can make to your visitor engagement, click rates, and conversions.
Whatever purpose your website serves, your main motivation will be to attract new visitors and gain return visitor traction. By ensuring you select the right photographs for your site, you can achieve just that.
Choose High-quality Images
The first important thing to consider is quality. Every photo you use on your website should be of high quality and look professional.
Go with images that have large pixels and high resolution. Also, consider how the photos appear on both desktop and mobile. They need to be of optimum quality on both.
Apply Photo Effects
The style of your photos needs to be related to your brand.
For instance, if your website is a hip and funky entertainment site, turning photographs of the team into Pop Art images could tie nicely into your brand.
On the other hand, if your website provides information on serious topics, such as medical malpractice, or offers services like funeral care, it could be best to go with black and white or sepia photographs.
With the free BeFunky editing tool, you can access hundreds of photo effects that you will not find anywhere else, from cartoonists to AI-powered effects. You can also use the tool for various editing purposes, like cropping, resizing, and adjusting exposures.
Experiment with Different Lighting
While you are in the editing stage, consider changing the lighting of your photograph of choice. You can easily use a free online photo editor to change lighting conditions and add lighting effects.
Again, consider your brand when experimenting with lighting effects. Dark and moody lighting may work for some brands while brighter pictures could work better for others.
Spend some time looking at examples of professional photographers’ works and getting to know the lighting tools in photo editing software so that you can maximize lighting in your images.
Get the Orientation Right
Professional website designers will tell you that it is always best to choose photos in landscape orientation rather than portrait.
The reason is most images are viewed on letterbox-style websites. Landscape-oriented photos fill the width of a screen without going too far down the page.
Portrait-oriented photographs are best reserved for headshots of you or your team.
For main-focal-point website photos, always choose a landscape orientation.
Utilize Your Photo’s Focal Point
You also need to carefully consider what the focal point of a photograph is.
While it is best to determine that before you take a photograph if you are using an existing photo, you can still crop it appropriately so that the image has a focal point.
That will enable viewers to engage more with the images and your website.
Just as important is considering where any overlaid text goes. Having an image that is hidden under the text is a poor design choice and will put off visitors.
Use Real People in Your Photographs
When using photographs of people on your website, it is always best to use photos of real people.
Having people on your website can help to promote your product or service. For example, you could show a couple holding hands to promote your dating service or you could have a photo of a family wearing matching pajamas to advertise your nightwear collection.
But if you use stock photos, you will end up with the same images that hundreds of other websites are using.
Quality websites always use photos of real people.