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 selecting images and graphics to represent our business can feel daunting. But there’s good news! You don’t have to be a professional graphic designer to select amazing images for your website. In this article, I’ll share tips for adding great-quality images to your website.
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, break up the text, and make it easier to read. Plus, they help your visitors 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.
Tips for Adding Great Quality Images to your Website
1) Find High-Quality Images
A high-quality image is crisp, clear, and sharp. It’s not blurry or pixelated (pixelated means you can see the individual pixels; see the 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.
2) Check They’re 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:
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 a woman in their 40s-60s, don’t pick images with young college students in them.
3) Know the Resizing Rules
One common mistake I see my students make in the Website Creation Workshop™ is adding blurry images to their websites. This is easy to do 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 to 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.
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 two-dimensional graphics created using geometric lines and shapes. Unlike raster images, vector graphics can be resized without concern about quality. They do not have pixels.
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.
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.
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. You can also read the article on the Psychology of Color here.
Final Thoughts on Images…
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 Workshop.
Also, check out my free training below, where I show you 7 simple steps to create cool, professional graphics…
Watch it here: https://websitecreationclass.com/graphicswebinar/
Hi Christina,
I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for the wonderful, abundant tips and training you provide. I know I’m not your ideal reader yet because I haven’t purchased your classes, but I hope to at some point–when I’m further along in my writing journey. Anyway, your training and tips provide value in an easy-to-understand way. I wholeheartedly recommend you and your website whenever I get the opportunity.
I hope you’re enjoying a pleasant day.
Carol,
Thanks so much for your kind words! I’m so glad you liked this one 🙂
Extremely well done as usual Christina! I really had no idea about all of the different
elements involved in selecting different images to use in our blog posts.
I just noticed sometimes when I enlarged certain images they looked
grainy.
But I had no idea why. Thanks to the instructional video.
Going forward I now have a much better understanding of what to do
and what not to do. Thanks!
Mark,
Nice to see you again!
Yes many people get tripped up by the ‘grainy image’ thing. Glad this post helped you clarify it 🙂