Affordable Web Design Ltd believes in utilizing vivid colours and attractive images.

Photos & Videos

WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS

How much is attracting a potential customer worth to you?

Most of us have heard the old adage "a picture is worth a thousand words" many times, and nowhere is it more applicable than in your company website. A website with a mostly white background, too much text, very few pictures or poor quality images tend to lose the viewer's attention quickly.

Catch your viewer's attention with a colourful, attractive website featuring lots of high quality images, and video with decent resolution. Putting it in perspective, if you spend an extra $200 when available. It's important to expose your products or services using attractive photos because this reflects on you. Poor quality pictures might be interpreted by viewers as poor quality products or services.

Affordable Web Design Ltd highly recommends buying online stock photos for your main website pictures, and saving your own pictures of your products for photo galleries and such. Once a viewer goes to your product photo gallery, they are ready to see actual product or service photos, and quality becomes less of an issue at that point.

In addition, there is a lot more to having great pictures on your website than just uploading a picture. There are picture sizing issues, file size optimization issues, and many other factors that professionals like Affordable Web Design team members know how to deal with for you. Optimizing is the most important, as it strips the file size down so that the picture uploads quickly without losing its sharpness.

Professional photos truly enhance a website.

PHOTOS AVAILABLE ONLINE

Google/Bing Images

It is probably best never to use any photos you find on search engines websites such as Google or Bing:

  • Copyright - Google images are not all copyright free. The search engines simply collect images from all websites, so if the original website used a copyrighted picture, you may be inadvertently getting into trouble with the original owners of those pictures. Companies who copyright their images have usually "tagged" them and can tell when someone is using one of their pictures.
  • Image Sizes - even if a picture is not copyrighted, because Google (among others) get their photos from millions of websites, whatever they show is in the original size used on that original website.
  • Image Quality - keeping in mind that Google images come from every website out there, the probability that someone used a poor quality photo is high, and that poor quality will reflect on you.

FREE ONLINE PHOTO WEBSITES

  • Free is not always free. Sellers will often use that tagline to entice you in, but they will then mention that the photo is "Royalty Free", which does not mean that it costs nothing. It simply means that the original producer of the photo is not getting paid for it.
  • Some free online sites are actually pretty good (for example Pexel and Unsplash), as long as you can find images that suit your purposes because they may offer limited choices of picture categories.

ONLINE STOCK PAY-PER-PHOTO SITES

  • This is your best choice. The quality of these photos is usually quite good, and you own the right to use the photography, videography or any other types of available imaging.
  • The internet offers a great choice of online photo websites. Most do charge for the photos, and prices can vary greatly.
  • The factor to keep in mind, though, is that a fair number of those sites will charge a different price per size of photo (SM-MD-LG-XXL-). You would therefore need to know in advance exactly what size of photo would fit wherever you want it to appear on your website, and this can often be problematic.
  • Here are a few of the most popular stock photo sites:
    • Shutterstock
    • IStock Photo
    • Dreamstime
    • Deposit Photos
    • 123RF
    • Adobe Stock Photos
    • Alamy
    • Getty Images

VIDEOS

When and how to use video on your website

Videos can greatly decrease the speed when your website page loads for viewing, so you need to be very careful in your usage of videos.

  • Speed - videos that have been uploaded to sites like You Tube have embedded software technology that allows for fast downloading.
  • Convenience - uploading to sites like You Tube allow you to simply add a bit of code to your website so that it ties in with the video that is on the You Tube server.
  • Quality - as with photos, if a video is of a poor quality, most people will not want to view it.

The effectiveness of incorporating video into your website depends on the kind of business you run.