Have you ever felt overwhelmed at the thought of choosing the right images for your website? Most small business owners and entrepreneurs aren’t design experts. And the task of selecting images and graphics to represent our business can feel daunting. 

Good news! You don’t have to be a professional graphic designer to choose great quality images for your website. With a few tips and tools, you can be confident about selecting unique images that engage your reader. 

Here’s a great video to give you a basic understanding of images. 

Why Are Images Important?

Whether you’re adding a large high definition landscape or a simple logo, images are an important aspect of your website. They add a visually pleasing element to your site. Images break up the text and make it easier to read. Plus, they help your visitor imagine themselves using your product or service.  

However, images are more than just pretty colorful decorations. They also set the tone for your site and evoke emotions for the viewer. Compelling visuals help you connect with the audience and capture their attention before they’ve even read a word on your page. 

Keep these tips in mind when you’re adding images to your website:

Tip #1 – Find High-Quality Images

A high-quality image is one that is crisp, clear, and sharp. It’s not blurry or pixelated (pixelated means you can see the individual pixels, see image below). It has a high resolution, as opposed to a low resolution.

Thankfully, high-quality stock images are easy to find. Even professional designers rely heavily on stock photography. In my article, My Top 7 Free Stock Photo Resources, you can find a variety of sites that offer a large and diverse selection of photos and illustrations on these sites.

I’ve already discussed the dangers of Googling for images in my article Beware of Where You Get Free Images. In addition to the copyright concerns, images from Google aren’t the resolution you need on your site.

Tip #2 – Relevant to Your Website

There are so many images to choose from on stock photography sites. How do you select the right one? 

Your image should be relevant to what you’re talking about on the page. Just because an image is beautiful, doesn’t mean it’s right for your website. Visitors are drawn to images that tell a story. Images should reflect and complement the topic on the page. 

The best stock images are connected to your work in a subtle way.  You can use illustrations or actual photos of people.  It all depends upon the mood and feeling you want to convey on your website.  See example below

illustrations vs photos

Using people in images is a powerful way to connect with your audience. However, make sure your image includes people in the same demographic as your target market. For example, if your ideal customer is women in their 40s-60s, don’t pick images with young college students in them. 

Tip #3 – Resizing Rules

One common mistake I see my students make in the Website Creation Workshop is adding blurry images to their website. It’s an easy mistake when images aren’t resized properly.

As a general rule, larger images are better. It’s much easier to shrink down a large image than enlarge a small image. When you try to stretch a small image, it becomes blurry and loses its quality. 

To understand why this happens, we need to talk about two different image formats. Raster images (photographs) are made up of hundreds of pixels. When the image is the correct size, the pixels are invisible. However, when you enlarge the raster image, you can see the pixels and the image appears blurry. Don’t do this! If the image you want isn’t big enough without stretching, choose another image.

vector vs raster image

This image is originally from Darth Stabro at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

However, vector graphics are 2-dimensional graphics created using geometric lines and shapes. Unlike raster images, vector graphics can be resized without concern about quality. These graphics do not have pixels. 

Tip #4 Make Simple Size Adjustments

After you find a high-quality image, you may want to make some adjustments to it. You can crop the image to fit your needs. Here’s an article on How to Crop an Image into a Circle. This adds a unique look to your website. 

One of my favorite free tools for editing photos is iPiccy. It’s user friendly and allows you to make all kinds of interesting adjustments to your picture. 

Tip #5 – Keep Color In Mind

When most people think of color on their website, they think of the font color, layout, and background. Those are all important. But color plays an important role in your images and graphics too. Using iPiccy, you can play around with adjusting the brightness, contrast, or saturation of a particular image. 

If you have text that is sitting on top of an image, you may want to mute the image brightness so that the text is easy to read. 

 

4 cupcakes in stages of desaturation

Desaturating cupcakes from pink to black and white

 

If you need help choosing a color palette for your website, read my article about Coolers.co – a fun free design tool.  And also read up on the Psychology of Color article here.

Conclusion

What kinds of images are on your website? Are they high-quality images that evoke emotions in your visitors? Do they tell a story and hook the visitor into your site?

Fortunately, you don’t have to be a professional designer to have great looking graphics on your website. Today’s technology makes it easy to find high-quality images and adjust them to fit your needs. 

If you’re interested in learning more about how to create eye-catching graphics for your website, check out my Graphics Creation Course.  In this course, I show you how to create amazing images yourself using free tools. Without hiring a graphic designer.  Join me on my free training webinar:

red arrow down“7 Simple Steps to Create Cool, Professional Graphics, Even if You’re Not a Designer!”

Watch it here: https://websitecreationclass.com/graphicswebinar/

 

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