Almost every website needs to use some stock imagery. The other alternative is to use custom photos, but it’s hard to have enough of those for the entire website design. High-quality stock images can be selected and customized by a web designer so that they are aligned with your branding and products or services.
How to Select the Best Stock Images
1. Consult with a Web Designer
The first thing is it’s really great during a website project to work with your web designer and have them help you pick out really high-quality stock images.
There are a lot of kind of free stock image sites out there, but those images tend to be used on a lot of kind of spammy type of websites and because of that, a lot of web visitors have an immediate negative reaction to seeing some of those photos.
2. Consider Your Service/Product
And when you’re looking for images, the other thing to think about is your service or product. So if you have kind of a B2B service, such as consulting or finance, it may be hard to find an image that perfectly represents that.
It can be better to use more lifestyle or more kind of generic photos that a designer can customize with certain filters. If you try to pick out something where someone’s looking at a piece of paper or talking in a conference room, it can really look like a very, very kind of stock photo.
3. Review the Image Rights
The other thing to think about are the stock image rights. So it’s probably pretty obvious but you don’t want to go on Google and just find an image and put that on your site. You also have to be very careful about where the image comes from.
If you try to say go to a paid stock site and download an image and try to get one without paying for it, that’s also violating a lot of copyright laws. And the stock image sites like Getty or Shutterstock actually have set up algorithms and have ways to track down images that haven’t been paid for.
When you’re looking for stock images, try to go to really high quality sites. It’s worth investing and a few high-quality, paid stock images on Getty or Shutterstock and definitely work with a web designer in selecting the images. If you have any questions definitely reach out to our team.
