Photos
, 2 min read
What photos does a small business website need?
A few honest photos do more for a small business site than a gallery of stock images. Which ones to take, and how to get them right on a phone.
People trust what they can see. A real photo of your shop, your team or your work tells a visitor you exist and that you are proud of what you do. A stock photo of a smiling stranger tells them nothing, and most people can spot one immediately.
You do not need many. Five or six good photos cover most small business sites, and a modern phone is enough to take them.
The photos that do the most work
The work itself
Whatever you sell, show it. The finished haircut, the plate of food, the fitted kitchen, the product on a plain background. This is what visitors came to judge, so it deserves the most room on the page.
The people
One photo of you, or of the team, looking at the camera. People buy services from people, and a face near the enquiry form makes getting in touch feel less like writing to a company.
The place
If customers visit you, show the front of the building from the street, so they recognise it when they arrive. Add one photo of the inside, so they know what to expect when they walk in.
The work in progress
A photo of something being made or done shows skill in a way a finished result cannot. It is also the kind of photo a competitor cannot copy.
Taking them on a phone
- Use daylight. Stand near a window or shoot outside, and turn the flash off.
- Clean the lens on your shirt first. It fixes more blurry photos than anything else.
- Hold the phone level, and step back rather than zooming in.
- Clear the background. A tidy counter beats a clever angle.
- Take twenty and keep the best two.
One honest photo of your actual work beats ten perfect pictures of somebody else’s.
When stock photos are fine
Stock images work for backgrounds and for things that are hard to photograph, such as an idea or a general setting. They do not work for anything a visitor will read as you: your team, your premises or your results. Using them there is the fastest way to make a real business look like a template.
Do not slow the site down
A photo straight off a phone is several megabytes, far bigger than a web page needs. Before it goes on the site it should be resized to roughly the size it is shown at and saved in a web format like WebP. A good builder does this for you. If yours does not, it is the single biggest reason small sites are slow on a phone.
When we build a site we resize every image for phones before launch, and if one of your photos is letting a page down, we tell you plainly rather than quietly using it.