How to choose imagery for your site

Identify your brand 

What do you want to say about your brand? Are you young and fun? Polished and professional? With imagery, you’re able to present your audience with the brand personality from the moment they visit your site. Make sure that you’ve planned out what you’re hoping to convey, then choose the right style of imagery. If you’re going for a casual, youthful feel, make sure you keep things colourful and casual. For a more polished approach, choose darker colours and a sleek look. 

To Stock or Not To Stock

This is a big question, but it’s not an all-or-nothing answer. It’s completely fine to supplement your existing imagery with good quality stock photography. Stock imagery can get a bad rap but, used well, it’s a great tool to have in your arsenal. If it’s all you have, we’ll be able to work with you to make sure that it looks great on site. 

The trick is to take the time to choose stock imagery that doesn’t look stock. We don’t want clinical office settings with a group of smartly dressed workers and frozen smiles, or models pointing at buzzwords on whiteboards. We’re looking for imagery that illustrates what your website is saying, that fits into your brand, and that fits seamlessly into the other imagery on your site. 

If you do have the time and resources to hire a photographer, we’d always recommend this for the clients who have a specific offering. There’s no way to supplement this with stock, especially if you want to show off your equipment, product range, facilities or other things that set you apart from the competition. 

Get creative with product photos

This is one thing that stock imagery can’t do: your product photos should be of your real products whenever possible. We know it can be a big job, but you’ll reap the rewards of a really great product photo. Customers don’t just want to see one photo on a plain white background! Show your products in situ, in use, with multiple angles, with details. With the ability to feel that they’ve inspected the product before they buy, you’ll see that your customers feel much more confident purchasing from an unknown online. 

Quality First 

Whatever your image is, the only thing that we can’t work with is bad quality. An image that’s not got the resolution just doesn’t look good; you want imagery that looks great no matter the screen size. We sometimes see blurry images copied from other sites, or even screenshots, but these sorts of images stick out like a sore thumb amongst the other imagery. Make sure you watch your file types here; we prefer to use a good quality jpeg or a png. Other file types don’t tend to stand up to the expansion test in the same way. 

Showcase real people

Put a real life friendly face to your organisation. The best people to choose for this are your employees! Especially for small businesses, there’s a lot to gain from showing a little bit of personality and putting a face to the name that your customers will be speaking to. If you’re not sure about using your own employees, we’ll make sure that we choose stock photography that works well. We’re looking for friendly smiles from people relevant to your brand; in the right age range, and from a range of demographics that your audience can relate to. 

Be aware of licensing 

Image licensing is a complicated subject, but getting it wrong can lead to some very sticky situations. We play it safe here at Zinc; we’ll want imagery that you’ve taken yourself, that you have a licence for already, or that we have downloaded from the stock imagery library that we use. Unfortunately, we won’t use things that you’ve found on Google if we’re not able to see how to use it legally, to prevent anything arising in future. 

Image selection is something our design team will help you work through as part of our website design and build process. We’ll even help you source a photographer through one of our partners.