When it comes to building a spectacular website, it’s not just about your website designer and developer prioritising functionality and looks, quality photography is just as essential. Here’s why.
The Problem with Stock Photography
As soon as you start talking about photography within web design, the question quickly becomes “what is wrong with selectively using stock images?” and on the surface, absolutely nothing! If you can find the absolutely perfect image for your website and you’re 100% sure the majority of your competitors haven’t also used it, and it’s also absolutely consistent with the rest of your images, go ahead, why not? The trouble is, finding images that match up to that degree. This is where professional photography shows its value for a website designer.
Matching Photography to Quality Web Design
In combining both beautiful web design and amazing, quality photography, you can aim to produce a spectacular, combined elegance. Images taken and selected for the exact space designed for them. With everything working in symbiosis to create a website that is at once impactful and sleek.
Properly Optimised Photos
One of the major issues we see slowing sites down, beyond repetitive free stock image choices, is poorly optimised photos. Either too HD or too low definition. Weird placements. Too many images. Both the website and the photos need to be working in tandem with an understanding of the capabilities and limits of both. In this sense, with a quality photography website designer you can create a website that flows effortlessly. With seemingly massive HD images in some locations and more conservative choices in others.
Mobile Web Design Requires Even More Thinking
This use of poorly optimised, and often too many images, is a big problem in mobile website design. A website designer might be trying to create a website that optimises and loads extremely similarly between mobile and desktop and massively underestimating the shift in screen size or mobile loading speeds. 5G isn’t everywhere just yet, and until it is, loading speeds need to be taken into account, especially when it comes to photography.
The Power of Specific, High-Quality Photography and Website Designer
I don’t think I can emphasise enough how important great photography can be for an online brand. From shaping the way you and your brand are perceived online over to simply illustrating what it is you do properly, photography is crucial. Depending on what your online business does, it can make the difference between thriving and failing. For instance, far too many eCommerce stores simply use manufacturers’ photos. Using website designer photography is always going to be superior. Manufacturer photos are all well and good for when you’re initially setting a product page up. However, the message it sends customers is that you are identical to your competition, selling the exact same products. This is no way to cultivate any kind of brand loyalty or distinction.
Branding Through Website Designer and Photography
That leads us on nicely to branding. Photography is vital for branding within your website. Without quality, professional photography, you’re going to struggle to create the homogenous whole that lends itself to real success online. Digital marketing, brand loyalty, and a dozen other important elements hinge on quality branding. Having a website designer that understands this importance in photography terms is a powerful thing.
Flesh Out Your Social Media
Lastly, social media. I know, I know, everyone’s sick of hearing about it. However, spend a quick minute scrolling through LinkedIn and tell me how you feel about the endless stock images. Not great. Having quality, professional photos that are on-brand and connected to your photography website designer overall approach is extremely useful.