Choosing the right type of images and illustrations for your corporate website
A website is nowadays one of the best ways to promote your business or organization to the world. It’s a platform where you can communicate with potential customers and sell your products or services. Your website needs to be informative and easy to navigate; it should also be aesthetically pleasing and maintain current security standards. Your choice of design affects how people view your organization. Therefore, it’s crucial to consider your target audience before designing your website.
If you decide to use your own pictures for your website, it is important to make sure that you are still producing high-quality images that reflect a true profile for your business. Don’t hold yourself to a lower standard than a professional photographer, because your website viewers won’t! People expect high-quality visual content, even if they are just pictures around your office. So, whether you use your smartphone or a high-end camera to take pictures for your website, make sure you follow professional recommendations or online guides that can help you take nice-looking pictures.
But how to find the best image and illustrations for your website if you don’t want or can produce those images yourself? There are mainly 3 different routes to consider:
1 – Hiring a professional photographer
The decision to hire a professional photographer is not always easy. It is important to understand the benefits that a professional photographer can provide so that you can make the best decision possible. Professional photographers offer a variety of services that are tailored to your needs. They typically offer a variety of packages that can range from a simple photo shoot to a complete website illustration package.
Hiring a professional photographer is a fantastic way to ensure that you look your best. Whether it’s for your website images, your location, your corporate headshots or your work process, a professional photographer will know how to capture pictures that really represent and correspond to your business strategy, identity and philosophy. They’ll be able to help guide you through the whole process.
By hiring a professional photographer you get quality images, and it enables you to actually feature your products, services, employees, and happy customers in the photos. A talented photographer knows how to produce a photo shoot and create images that show your personality. Leaving the responsibility of creating original snapshots to someone else lets you actually be more productive with your website. The result is a content library of on-brand images that will promote you for years to come.
Of course, quality comes at a price and it is recommended that you first evaluate your photographer based on how the quality and style of their portfolio fit your vision. In Cambodia, especially in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, you’ll have a wide range of talented photographers to choose from.
2 – Buying stock photos and videos online
Stock photos seem to be everywhere, but some sources are better than others. The first step is to understand your budget and needs: If you need a lot of stock photos, or you need new photos regularly over time, it might be worth considering a paid image service. You may already know these names: Shutterstock, Alamy, Depositphotos and dozens of others that sell quality stock images and often also videos.
Choose stock photos like you choose dates: proceed with extreme caution. This is the key to website optimization, and your content deserves better company. Be selective. Don’t fall for the “smiling man with a laptop or smartphone” and let the “high five clowns” know you’ve decided to use the talents of someone else.
But stock photos have one significant advantage over custom images, price and ease of use. You can browse and download all the stock photos you need in a matter of hours for a rather small, fee. Compare this to private shooting, which will require hiring a photographer and scheduling photo shoots and sometimes models. The time, money, and effort involved in customizing photos can quickly add up.
Stock photos are like a powerful spice: they’re at their best throughout, but use too much at once and it’ll be the only thing anyone tastes (or sees). Stock imagery works best when interspersed with custom imagery to strike a balance between originality and price.
With stock photos, artists upload photos or other visual content such as illustrations, video clips, or vector files that they have taken, edited, and finished elsewhere, and typically submit it to a stock agency, who splits it with the photographer’s royalty. Stock photos will give you the images you really need – often without attribution requirements.
3 – Finding free stock images and illustrations
Free photo sites offer a wide range of images and graphics that you can use for free – invaluable for eCommerce entrepreneurs on a tight budget. They don’t have a huge library of images like premium image sites, but you’re sure to find high-quality, copyright-free images that match your eCommerce store design.
Finding free stock images for your website is an important part of ensuring that your website is visually appealing and also helps to achieve your goal of improving your SEO. Being able to find free stock images is not as hard as you think. There are a lot of websites that offer quality free stock images that you can use. The only downside is that the quality of the images offered is not always the best. The best way to find free stock images is to search online. In order to find the best free stock images, you should use the search term “free stock images” or “free images”.
For sure, finding free images for your website can be difficult, especially when you are just starting out. There are a lot of free stock photos available on the internet, but finding the right one can be difficult. It is important to know that there are a lot of different ways to find free images for your website. But be careful how you find them. Many people starting with a new website think they can just use Google Images and that can put them in great trouble as most of the images you’ll find there are copyrighted by other website owners or photographers.
Your best bet is to use dedicated websites that offer free stock images like Pixabay, Unsplash or Pexels (as this is the case here, for this article for instance). There are also plenty of similar places that provide free images for your website. Each website has its own unique features and benefits. It is important to know what the features are before choosing which website to use.
