Design
Your photos matter more than your design
I can make a plain layout look good. I cannot make bad photographs look good, and neither can anyone else.
The fastest way to make a small business site look untrustworthy is stock photography — the smiling team in a bright office that is not yours, in a city that is not yours. People recognise it instantly, even when they cannot say why, and it makes everything near it feel less true.
Your phone camera is good enough. What it needs is light and a little discipline.
Six rules
- Shoot in the morning or the late afternoon. Noon sun makes hard shadows and blown-out skies.
- Put the light behind you, falling on the subject — not behind the subject, which turns them into a silhouette.
- Get closer than feels natural. Hands working, a joint, a finished edge. Detail reads as competence.
- Clean the frame. Move the hose, the trash can, the truck keys. Thirty seconds of tidying is worth more than any filter.
- Shoot horizontal and vertical of everything. A website needs wide; a phone needs tall.
- Wipe the lens. It is in your pocket. It is smeared. That is why your photos look hazy.
What to photograph
Finished work, from a few angles. Work in progress, which is more interesting than finished work. You, one honest picture, looking at the camera — not a stiff portrait, and not a wedding photo from 2009. Your building or your truck, so people know they have arrived. Before-and-after pairs, framed from the same spot.
Before they go on the site
Resize them. A photo straight from a phone can be five megabytes; on the web it wants to be a few hundred kilobytes. Then write a line of alt text for each one describing what it shows — that line is what a screen reader announces and what a search engine reads.
Twenty good photographs will do more for your site than any redesign. They are also free, and you can go take them this afternoon.