Website Photos 101: The Photos You SHOULD Be Using & Where to Get Them

Key Takeaways

if you want to know how to fill your website with beautiful photos on any budget I'm going to give you all my best tips and we're starting right now if you want to transform your website into a customer or lead generation machine I'll show you all my best tips tactics and secrets to get there fast let's dive in hey there I'm West McDow web strategist for the deep end and if you're not subscribed to the channel yet we do two new videos here a week so just click on the Subscribe button and the little bell icon next to it so you never miss another video you need to succeed online so next to the overall marketing message and the words you choose on your website nothing else can make more of a direct impact uh than the images on your site whether it's grainy pixelator photos or cheesy stock photos or even just really amateurish looking snapshots picking the wrong photos can really do a lot of damage to your reputation online and since your website is often the first impression people get of you you really can't afford to lose people by what those bad photos might be saying about you so in this video we're going to focus on uh the kinds of photos you might want to focus on you know talking about the content of those photos the kinds of images you should never use under any circumstances and a few of my favorite sources where you can find these photos online uh one free and one paid and if you've seen my videos before you know I'm not going to leave you hanging and I'm going to in the end give you a few of my best pro tips to really help you make the best use out of the images that you do choose so what kind of photos should you think about using you know in every business is going to be different so your business is probably different from somebody else watching this video so everything I'm going to talk about here is definitely open to a certain degree of customization in general there are three different kinds of photos I'm going to be talking about the first are happy customer images the second are metaphor images and the third are ambient images and in some cases you may actually want some more business Centric photos of team members or Interiors of your office I'll talk about that as well and when it's appropriate to use those so let's start by talking about those happy customer photos um they don't necessarily have to be your actual customers think of these more as kind of customer stand-ins so these are basically just happy images of people uh showing that after state of after having worked with you or using your product or service and one of the main reasons why we like using these is because images of people have been shown in countless studies to just be much more more attention grabbing than almost any other kind of photo I guess we're just wired to be drawn to faces now one common trap you don't want to fall into so many businesses and so many websites tend to want to include uh Team Member photos or staff photos or even staff standin photos that they find on stock photo sites instead and this almost never works because with when you put photos of your team members or people that are supposed to be part of your team in those photos it basically Al inserts your business as the hero in your customer story when they're the hero of Their Own Story it basically just tells your customers here we are let me tell you about us when they'd rather see themselves in their own journey in other words if you're a divorce attorney you'd be much better off showing a photo of a woman who's happy to be getting back on with her life than a photo of you in your office there's actually another place that's more appropriate to put that photo and we'll get to that in a little bit next type of photo I want to talk about is a metaphor photo if the last type of photo was all about a customer's transformation this one is all about illustrating an idea the classic example of this is uh the photo of the light bulb to talk about having a big idea and I'm not suggesting that that's a little played out or if you're talking about the success that you get for your clients you could show a photo of someone who just climbed a Mountaintop just be careful here that you don't get too far into cheesy territory it can be easy to do that so you have to choose your photos really carefully and you don't always need to call too much attention to the metaphor the photo can be a little on the subtle side there are many places you can use these you know you can use these in the benefit section instead of icons just pick a really good visual metaphor for each benefit you offer and you're good to go now let's talk about those ambient photos now these are just there to add a little bit of texture and color to the site these can be patterns Landscapes skylines uh neighborhood details just about anything really I like to use ambient photos in subtle ways just to kind of break up the content into sections and also as backgrounds it's just a great way to break up the monotony other than using white and colored backgrounds one thing to be careful though you want to make sure you keep it subtle even if it's bright it should be used to call more attention to the text rather than distracting away from it and also don't use these images as hero images in most cases I can't tell you how many websites I see of businesses that use a Skyline in their hero photo which is just confusing you know are you selling real estate unless you're selling these buildings they don't belong there now let's talk about those business Centric images and when it might make sense to actually use them now there's basically two types here one are team or staff member photos and the second are Interiors of your office or your space I think it's great to actually get some custom photos done of you and your team particularly if they show off your personality you know people do like to see that there's real human beings behind a business and the less staged these are the better they generally come off so I I really like candid shots for this purpose and in some Industries you may have to keep it a little more buttoned up you know some require a bit more professionalism like attorneys or doctors but you should still be going for genuine impersonable no matter what you know cold stoic shots um aren't going to really impress anyone and they're no more professional than genuine and warm photos are and generally I would use these on your about page um you may want to use one or two on your homepage especially if you are the brand and you're trying to establish a little bit of authority on that homepage for instance if you're an interior designer you'd probably want to put your photo on somewhere on the homepage but usually not in the hero area up top you know you'd want to show a happy customer or client first and then as you scroll down now we're introduced to you so when does it make sense to show case your Interiors in photos um generally anytime where people are actually looking at that as trying to figure out if they want to work with you or not so I can definitely think of a restaurant being the best example here or even a brick and mortar store or a gym anything where the overall facilities and Ambiance is going to be important to people and in those cases what you probably want to do is not just show the Interiors uh either empty or with your team members or staff members but you probably want to show actual customers um interacting with your service or product in the space having a good time and I highly recommend if you're going to do this that you go the pro route and not try to take snapshots of yourself camera lenses are just really important here as is lighting so you definitely want to leave this to the pros amateur snapshots are always going to look a little amateur even though we've got great phones on our camera these days they still don't have that Pro look that you're going to really want to feature on your website so what else do we have to be really careful about with photos um the biggest thing I want to talk about are obvious stock photos way too many websites use these really cookie cutter looking stock photos and they can do a lot of damage to your brand at best they can make you just come across as lazy and unimaginative and at worst they can actually make people trust you a whole lot less you know look at this fake customer service rep for instance do you think anyone actually believes that she works for the plumber you just found online she doesn't even go here okay go home I mean it's a small small thing but it actually looks like you're hiding something and not really being upfront with your customers about who works for you some websites even use a photo like this in their chatbot which is just really bad at earning trust from your customers now I'm not saying that all stock photos are bad there's some really great choices out there so just don't settle for the first thing you can find I would just stay away from Super corporate looking stuff super techy looking stuff it's all just become really cliche at this point and when you're choosing the right stock photo you're not trying to trick them into thinking it's not a stock photo you actually want that thought just to not even enter their head at all in other words if you do your job right and you choose right they won't even think about it one way or the other so where can you get these really great looking stock photos for your website well I've got two options one is free and one is paid with a free trial my favorite free resource is called stock libra.com and this basically compiles all the free stock site collections so you just search once and you get all the results from all all the free stock sites online they have some great images and most have that cool instagramy authentic look which is great for some Brands but not for everybody and all these images are completely free and clear to use from a legal perspective as well which actually reminds me do not go to Google image search and just try to find something for free there you can get in a lot of legal trouble that way always get your images legally you know they can actually do reverse image lookups so anyone who's taken a photo can see exactly who's using it online online so just don't even try that and for the paid option you know I personally use shutterstock.com but I it's an expensive subscription because I have so many uh needs for all my client projects and to be honest that might be Overkill you probably don't need that so um if you're just trying to fill up your site on a non-recurring basis I'd go with Adobe stock they have a monthly option which gives you 10 photos for $29 each month and there's a free trial so technically you could get 10 photos absolutely free but you didn't hear that from me and if you didn't want a monthly subscription there are credit packages you can buy it gets a little confusing because there's certain images that are considered premium some that aren't so you what I would recommend is first just go on there and find the images you want and then figure out the best route to get them whether that's a one Monon subscription or just buying a credit pack and by the way I think that splurging on really high quality images on a few of your really important pages is a great way to spend part of your website budget and by Splurge I mean well under $10000 possibly even free so there's really just no excuse for those lowquality photos anymore okay and I promised you a few Pro tips so here they are to make these work even better for you okay so tip number one anytime you're trying to draw attention to a headline or a CTA button if you can choose an image of a person who's looking in the direction of that content that headline or that button that's going to naturally draw the viewer's eye to that spot as well so once you know exactly how things are going to be laid out on your site try to see if you can find an image where someone's looking in that direction and secondly if you're trying to lay out text or content on top of an image you may need to knock it back a bit so it's not fighting for attention and even worse hard to read obviously if you have Photoshop you can use that and there's an online tool called canva that will accomplish this for you as well it's a little bit of a learning curve but it's not hard to do otherwise if you really just don't want to deal with it yourself at all you can always use a site like Fiverr and find a photo editor on there where you just give them all your photos tell them what you need exactly they can crop them they can resize them they can add the overlays and they'll usually get all that work done for you in a couple hours for right around five bucks now I'd probably ask them for a few variations some where the the overlay is a little darker somewh it's a little lighter so you can just play around and see which one's going to work best on your site that'll help it fade back a bit so that your headline can be the real star which it should be remember the written words in the the marketing message are always going to be the thing that ultimately makes the sale for you but if you choose the right images to accompany them they can really help bring those words to life all right but now I want to hear from you and I want to know if there's any other uh sources where you've had good luck finding images for your site that I didn't cover here leave that with any questions or other comments in the comment section below and I'll read through everything and I'll answer any questions that I possibly can and if you're not subscribed to the channel yet go ahead and click on the circle icon right over here to subscribe and if you're ready to step up to a more strategic website there are many ways I can help you so just go ahead and click this box right up here to see those different ways and to see if it makes sense for us to work together all right guys I'm West mcdal for the deep end I'll see you in our next video