It’s easy to start making a website: contact a web studio or create it yourself using templates. The difficulty is to fill it with content that is interesting to potential visitors or customers. Think about this at the stage of building the site so that your photos, videos, and texts look harmoniously with the design.
The importance of the visual
Spend more time on visual content. Why? Because people don’t like to read texts; they focus on images, videos, and GIFs more. Information provided through them is easier to digest. If you sell a product, it’s better to show how it works in one photo than to describe it in a hundred words. Visual storytelling is suitable for all types of sites: from news portals to one-page service advertisements.
SEO optimize images to boost your search engine rankings. Use high-quality but not larger sized photos, insert keywords into the file name, alt-texts, and captions.
But where to get high-quality photos and illustrations? There are several options.
Photo stocks
You can buy ready-made photos on photo stocks. Don’t count on free images, as they are always boring, narrowly focused, and worse than paid ones. Besides, due to their accessibility, every third site uses them. When buying, pay attention to the license and the possibilities that it allows when using the item.
Photo studio
Get visual content from a special photo studio. Usually, designers do this, but only when they need a small detail that is not on stocks. This is good when you need to show interaction with a branded object, for example, a card of a certain bank, a bottle of water, a brand of shampoo, etc. For more complex tasks, contact professional photographers.
Shoot yourself
This option is for enthusiasts who are just going to create their first web project. And, in fact, this is one of the best solutions, because you can make a unique website with your vision. Of course, this is also the most energy-consuming decision, but it can be worth it. Shoot in a homemade or professional studio, outdoors, or anywhere else. Remember that the photos should not look amateurish, so you need to buy professional equipment.
Also, don’t upload raw photos directly from the camera to the site. Adjusting brightness, white balance, contrast, noise reduction, cropping, and more – all this makes the photo perfect. In most cases, it’s not difficult and you can do it yourself with the retouch app.
To keep your site up and running, don’t forget about content on an ongoing basis and not only at the time of launch. You can run a huge advertising campaign, but your visitors will love your project only if they like what you post there.