Why is Great Photography Crucial for Your Website?
Did you know that 38% of visitors will stop engaging with your website if your content is visually unattractive, or that 48% deem good website design to be the number one sign that a company can be trusted? When it comes to aesthetics, in addition to choosing the right colors, fonts, and artistic style, your choice of imagery is key. This is as much the case in your opening page as in your About, Products/Services, and even your Blog sections. Find out how to present your photography in an artistic, efficient, dynamic way.
Photographs displayed on your website should contain a significantly high resolution so as to offer your readers greater clarity and crispness. Your audiences should be able to zoom in enough to check out one part of the photographer in minute detail, particularly when it comes to product images. The higher the resolution the slower the page load time. Make sure your images are not so large that users struggle with viewing them. Use JPEG images (which are faster to load than PNGs and other formats), don’t upload images weighing more than around one megabyte, optimize your images (don’t scale down large images as this make your page take very long to load) and test your website load speed through dedicated web page test sites that will run optimization tests and make suggestions for improvements.
Capturing Hearts with Your Photo Display
Some pages will contain a blend of word and text. Templates work well to help you position each accordingly. However, if parts of your website are composed almost exclusively of imagery (for instance, a photography blog or memories section), you can present various pictures at once, cropping and resizing pictures so the effect is similar to an online collage. For instance, the screen can be divided into two, with one large landscape photo taking up the entire left page, and a blend of landscape and square images occupying the right-hand side. Presenting images this way highlights their beauty, since images can be used to contrast shapes and colors in a visually arresting manner.
Relying on Professional Photography
Depending on the industry you work in, it may very well be worth investing in the services of a professional photographer. Ideally, your chosen photographer should be able to provide a blend of video and still images, for use both on your website and your social media pages. If you work in media, for instance, and you cover local social events, restaurants, prominent people etc., the photography should have the correct lighting, resolution, and background. If your industry is less visual in nature, you can probably get away with using quality stock photography by companies like iStock or Shutterstock, both of which offer a bevy of professionally taken photos for a relatively small subscription fee.
Because modern day consumers have so many audiovisual temptations, any company wishing to be a standard bearer needs cutting-edge photography on their website. Templates will help you lay out standard articles, but especially if you work in the media or an artistic field, an in-house designer will ensure your images are set in an appealing, proportionate manner that is true to your brand and style. It all begins with the source of the photo, of course. Everyone may have a camera on them at all times, but taking a cracking photo is an art that requires training and of course, the talent that only one who is truly passionate about photography, has.