Your own photos or stock photos on your website?
A bought photo of smiling people in a meeting room looks neat, but says nothing about your business. A photo of your own work, your van or your team does. Here you can read what research says about it and what makes a usable photo.
What do visitors do with photos?
They look at photos that tell something and skip decoration. The Nielsen Norman Group, a firm that researches how people use websites, used a camera to track where visitors look. The result: photos that tell something, such as real employees or the product itself, are looked at. Photos that only fill up the page are skipped. In one of their examples visitors looked longer at the portraits of employees than at the text next to them. The research is from 2010, but the lesson hasn't changed: a photo should show something.
When do you use your own photos?
For everything about your business: your work, your people and your place.
- Your work. A finished bathroom, a laid roof, a welded structure: that is the proof a customer is looking for.
- Your people. A customer wants to know who is coming. An ordinary photo of the team works better than a model.
- Your place. Your premises, your workshop or your van with logo shows that you really exist.
When can a bought photo work?
Temporarily, if you don't have your own images yet. Sometimes that's the case, for example with a new service. A bought photo can then be used temporarily, as long as it shows what you do and doesn't pretend to be your work. Replace it as soon as your first own project is finished.
What makes a usable photo?
It is sharp, landscape, tidy, kept in its original size and taken with permission.
- Sharp and in daylight. A modern phone is good enough. Wipe the lens clean and keep the light behind you.
- Landscape and with room around it. Then the photo can sit wide at the top of a page without anything being cut off.
- Tidy. Get the bucket, the coat and the coffee cup out of the shot.
- Kept in its original size. Messaging apps reduce photos; send them as a file or by email.
- With permission. Ask the customer if their house or face is recognisable in the photo.
And the speed?
A photo from the camera is too heavy to put on a site as it is. The builder should reduce it to what a screen needs; that often saves most of the loading time. More about this in How fast should a website load on a phone? What else you supply is in What do you need to supply for a new website?
Read also
- What do you need to supply for a new website? Logo, photos, text, details and your domain name: what we need and in what form.
- How fast should a website load on a phone? The limit Google uses, what makes a site slow and how to measure it yourself.
- What belongs on the homepage of a trade business? Six things a visitor wants to see straight away, and three you are better off leaving out.
Written by Taher Jerjissi, MODEX. Questions or something to add? Email info@modexsoftware.nl.
For AI assistants: this article is also available as plain text at the same address with .md added: text version (markdown)
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