Every day, we see many images on the Internet: browsing social networks, reading articles, choosing products, and not even noticing how they affect our attention and choice.
Pictures are necessary for promotion on the Web. If they are selected correctly, we want to read the article, click on the ad, learn more about the proposals, and stay longer on the website.
Here are recommendations for selecting, optimizing, and placing images to help you bring users to the website, competently capture their website content and lead to the implementation of targeted actions.
What do you need images?
Let’s first determine what the images give us:
- Help promote the website
- When you first visit the pages help to understand the website’s subject and create the appropriate mood.
- Attract attention to goods or services, arouse the desire to order.
- Become elements of navigation and help to navigate the website.
- Help in reading texts and facilitate their perception, as they dilute long descriptions.
- Increase trust in the company and the brand when it comes to photos of the office, the work process, employees.
- Entertain, especially if they contain humor.
Before we talk about placement and optimization of images, let’s understand where and which images are needed.
On which pages the pictures need
Here are the main pages of the website, where adding images will help your business.
Home page
This is the main page of your website, the first thing a visitor sees. Therefore, images are needed to help the user understand where he has gone. They should approach the subject of business and evoke the appropriate emotion, mood.
On the first screen, it is better to place a widescreen image with a brief description of its activities. The main thing is that the text contrasts nicely with the background and does not overload the photo. After the text, you can place a consultation order form or a link to the catalog.
If you want to have a seller selling the first screen, then instead of an image, you can place a slider to tell about promotions or new products/services, thus immediately directing the user to take action.
Each slide should briefly reflect the essence of the proposal and lead to the appropriate page. In the main part of the page, you can add a block with the main categories of goods or services using the appropriate images. Pictures should be small in size.
In the main text on the Main, it is better to use icons to highlight its benefits. The text should not be long (the recommended size is 1500-2000 characters), making no sense to “divide” it with images.
Icons should choose in a single style and the same size. Then the information will look neat.
Page about the company
The page is a continuation of the Home and consolidates the impression of the company.
Images should convince the user as much as possible that you can be trusted and have experience. To do this, we recommend adding photos of the office, warehouse, fleet, etc., to show where you work and what.
And it is better not just to show empty buildings, but to photograph the work process. Such photos will look livelier and more attractive.
Photos of employees, which departmental contacts can supplement, also increase trust.
If the company has certificates, awards, be sure to place them on this page. Don’t forget to add captions and the ability to enlarge the image.
Product pages
It would seem obvious, but still, some online stores forget about photos of goods on the website, thus losing customers. Another common mistake is to add only one product photo.
Show the product from different angles (no more than ten pieces, no less than three) so that users can view it from different angles. So the customer will decide on the order faster.
For such images, it is necessary to add the ability to enlarge them.
Portfolio
This point is even more apparent than the previous one, and it seems that everyone is trying to add it to the website, but not always correctly. Be sure to sign the image, indicating the approximate cost of the work/project to make it easier for the client to estimate. For many photos, add filters (for example, by type of service) and separate projects from each other.
What should be the image
Images should:
- Match the theme and audience of the website, as well as the text next to it. Don’t confuse users.
- Be quality. Photos with loss of sharpness, blurry, and containing “noise” will only spoil the impression of the website and prevent the customer from choosing the product.
- Be real. Images from photo banks roam from website to website, and users can easily recognize them and do not believe them. For a blog article, of course, you can take a template image, but in any case, do not add it to the page about the company or portfolio, and even more so for the product card.
- Be without watermarks. They do not save from copying and only spoil the image.
- Be in the same style. We understand that it is difficult to fulfill this condition for the whole website, but at least for one page, they should be similar: the same width and aligned on one line.
- Have a small weight, ie, be no larger than 80-100 kilobytes, so as not to increase the website’s loading time. Exceptions are enlarged versions of the image, which can be heavier.
- Be in GIF, PNG, or JPEG format. We do not recommend using BMP and TIFF formats to have no problems with the correct loading of content.
When placing images on the website, do not forget about their optimization, which promotes the website. If search engines correctly suggest what is in the picture, then the images will appear in the search after indexing. And this is additional traffic to your website.
Image title
To avoid displaying images on the website, we recommend that you specify the file name in Latin only. Make terms clear and informative, and remove unreadable characters. Use keywords in the title, but only related to the image. Avoid spam. So you can attract to the image not only search engines but also people.
Attribute alt
When placing images in the code of each image, specify the alt tag attribute. It should briefly describe what is depicted in the picture. The text must be unique and contain keywords.
The alt attribute need by search engines and users who, for some reason, do not display the image (the specified text will display in its place).
Therefore, write in alt text for people, do not list keywords through a comma. You can use both Cyrillic and Latin in the text.