Hello everyone, my name is Nathalie and today I’ll be talking a little bit about how to choose images for your website. First of all, we’ll talk about what’s the difference between custom imagery and stock imagery. Custom imagery would be you would hire a photographer. You would have actors playing out your scene. You would figure out exactly what the lighting would look like, where the setting that you would like to take the photography will be, what your demographic is, and who the models are going to be, what age they’re going to be.
Is it going to be a male or a female? Whereas for stock photography you would be going to websites like istockphoto.com for example. Another source would be Shutterstock or maybe Getty Images and you would be going through a whole library of photos still looking for the same items but it wouldn’t be quite as custom as you wouldn’t actually be choosing you know the exact environment, exact demographic, and setting it up as you would with a photographer for example. Both are great options. It really, a lot of it depends on what your budget is and you know the type of photography that you’re looking to create. Now I thought I’d talk a little bit about some tips. Let’s say you are trying to look for a hero image and a hero image is that large beautiful photo that you see when you come onto a website on the home page when you first land on the website.
Now some things to think about is sizing of the imagery you know. Are you looking for something that’s rectangular shaped? Are you looking for something that is a little bit longer in width but shorter vertically? So really take into consideration what size and what kind of lens are you looking at when you are picking out your photography. Another thing you have to take into consideration is colors. If you’re looking for photography with people in it, what color shirts are they wearing, what color eyes do they have, do the colors match with your branding, with your logo, with your color palette. All of those things really allow for just a beautiful and strong message in your images. And you should also take into consideration you know look over your messaging. Usually there’s one strong message that sits on top of that hero image. For example think about that message, think about what it means to your users, and how the image that you choose can convey that message. So the next time that you are looking for images for your website, consider custom versus stock and then try to follow those steps. This is Nathalie Walpole, TinyFrog Technologies. For more advice on choosing images and design tweaks, contact our team HERE.
