Why should businesses consider professional photography for a premium website?
Designing and developing a website can quickly begin to feel like a bit of a chore, and rightly so!
There are so many things to consider such as content, site navigation, graphic design, SEO and digital marketing. With all these high-priority pieces of the conceptual website pie to consider, photography is unfortunately commonly overlooked, but it really shouldn’t be. Photography is the key asset that helps tie in all the hard work your business has put into the rest of the website process. They help to bring your brand message to life, distinguish your brand from the competition, provide visual storytelling, build brand confidence and amplify the messages you have in your written content.
Unfortunately, the happy snaps you may have on your phone or ‘professional’ stock imagery just doesn’t make the cut in terms of creating a visually identifiable brand presence. Having professional photography on your website reduces the need to update images constantly and ensures that the style, lighting and branding all stay consistent throughout your site.
High-quality images amplify the messages in your written content
While written content can explain key concepts, services and selling points for your business in great detail, it is the imagery that will draw people into reading the key information first. No one will want to scroll through thousands of words on a website with no visual break, and the same goes for using terrible images. You may think that any image will do as long as it loosely relates to your business, but from a user perspective, they have given you their attention and have been rewarded with a subpar effort to make the visuals appealing. Hence why should they give your business any effort from their end?
To put it simply and to really sound cheesy “a picture paints a thousand words”, but no one will read it if you can’t write well, make it a great image and those thousand words will be worth reading.
Building Brand Confidence
Conveying your brand’s knowledge through text is paramount, but if your images don’t feel genuine or relate to your brand, all the hard work your company went through to write quality content means nothing. A website visitor will unknowingly compare your images to your content and if the quality of the two is not matching up, their confidence and likeness to interact with your company is drastically reduced. This creates distrust in your brand, whether users will think that you are a fake company or don’t have the correct resources to stay relevant, regardless, quality images lead to higher quality branding of your website.
Provide Visual Storytelling
Users should be able to understand at least 60% of what your business does from images alone. It is the first thing people see when visiting a new website. You want to inspire confidence in your brand and unfortunately, low-quality images rarely do this. High-quality, professional images can be placed to visually explain what your company does and how it does it resulting in an overall increase in the quality to your UI/UX to the website.
For instance, if your company is an interior renovations specialist, you should be showing off your team working, professional images of the final results, etc. This helps users to instantly identify the type of work you do as well as the quality of the finished product.
While it may seem obvious that high-quality images are better than low quality on your website, the difference can sometimes be getting a professional’s help. They may be able to view your company from an outside perspective a little bit better and help guide the visual storytelling you want to create.
Here at Designpluz, we encourage the use of professional photography and with our plethora of industry connections, we can help you along the path to creating a visually stunning online presence.
