A Picture paints a thousand words
In this blog we will talk about the different factors to be considered when adding images to a website.
How important are pictures to a website? They are an important part of the look and feel of your website, but they are much more important than just to look pretty. Images will attract more visitors, they can promote social sharing and bring your service to life.
Relevance
It’s important that the pictures you use on your website pictates your business/industry. Granted the above image on this blog article has nothing to do with Swodge – and if it was used as a main image for our website it wouldn’t attract the right audience and people would soon leave the website. That said, it’s a nice picture, which leads onto the next 2 points, Quality and Editing.
Image Quality
It’s amazing how an image can transform a website – a poor quality, grainy picture can undermine the look of your website. The same image that is the high resolution version, which is crisp and clear brings your website alive.
Applying Filters/Editing images
Like the image quality – don’t underestimate the importance editing your images can have. See below of an original, in-editing image vs one that has been edited. Whilst the original might actually be ‘better/real’ the edited one is more likely to stand out and draw attention.
The original image isn’t a bad picture, and there hasn’t been much editing needed, but even a slight adjustment is worth making.
Impact images can have on Performance
So we’ve covered including good quality images – you’ve taken some high resolution images. I should add them to the website, right? Not exactly. Whilst it is important to have good quality images, that doesn’t mean the ‘best quality’ is better. There is a trade off. It is also important that your website performs well – that means, not making your potential customers wait for your page to load, and the higher the resolution of the image the longer the page will take to load. If your website is slow, your potential customers will leave your site.
Other considerations
We’ve mentioned how important relevant images are, there are 2 options. You can use stock images or use professional, custom images for your website. Stock images are good, but use wisely, whilst images of people are also a positive introduction to your website. If you use stock images of people, who aren’t part of your team you wouldn’t be giving the best impression to your potential customers.
