Web designers know that images play a crucial role in engagement and conversions. You can communicate a business’s brand and orient its website with images. They say a picture can paint 1,000 words, and in web design, you want to make sure your images can paint as many words as possible. So, let’s go over how you should approach images in web design.
Images must be highly relevant to work. Flashy and attention-grabbing images will attract attention and possibly lead more people to click. But any images that don’t make sense or make unfulfilled promises won’t work.
Website images are meant to enhance a webpage and provide a visual aid that provides either information or context. An image should communicate the information you’re trying to share or demonstrate the results that your business is offering customers. For example, images of happy people surfing on a beach is a great idea for a business offering tourism services. The image doesn’t have to provide information, but it sets the tone for what the viewer can expect if they continue scrolling down.
Lesson one is that you can’t just add images to make your website look pretty. But you should make your website look pretty with images that enhance your propositions and brand. This first challenge is unfortunately the hardest for a business to take care of on its own. But there’s still a solution.
The easiest way to always have access to high-quality images is to use stock images. Stock agencies offer access to and licensing for stock photos of all categories. Stock image sites offer photos for everything while focussing on the trendiest categories of the day. They offer different pricing plans so you can pay just enough to suit your needs.
Search for the stock images in the category you need.
Engagement may sound like a vague topic at first. But web designers and UX professionals know there’s a science behind engaging imagery. Psychology provides us with what we need to know about how certain images promote certain responses. Different colours trigger different emotions, for example. But there are several things you may want to use in your images. As a start, read some of our other articles about colours and design. Creative success is based on stable foundations in design.
Once you find the right photo from a stock image site or your own library, you can edit it for more engagement. You can be as minimal as extravagant as you feel your subject matter justifies. But it’s commonplace to add text with trendy fonts or other embellishments to a design.
Photos of or with people are one of the most effective ways to capture attention and build engagement. In photos of people, it’s the faces that draw attention and create an emotional response. People are hardwired to want to communicate with other people, not just text and website code.
Websites that feature human faces create trust and lead to conversions. That’s why so many images used in ads feature happy people. If you find the right photo of people, just embellish it to be more relevant to your brand. It’s a proven recipe for greater engagement and sales.
Not only are people drawn to images of other people, they even follow their line of sight. So, when you use images of people on your site, pay attention to where the person’s eyes are looking. Use professional stock photos of people who look and emote in a way that matches your brand’s personality.
Hero images are an increasingly common feature on landing pages and home pages. They are large images that cover the entire screen, with text and other UI places on top. They are normally edited for some transparency, with the text and UI options on top coloured to be easy to read.
A hero image is a unique type of image that sets your website’s first impression. You can create a hero image using your own photos, or with a professional template. For example, if you offer dental services, you could choose a professional medical hero image. Then you can embellish and edit it to make it look better on your site.
Half the battle of making images efficient is choosing the right placement. The best web designs were made by professionals who knew exactly where to place every image, infographic, ad banner, and more. Once you’ve made your choice, you still need to ask yourself a few questions.
Generally, the most detailed and large images should be placed below the fold. The images closer to the top of the page should be introductory, they should set the mood of the page. As visitors scroll through your content, images should enhance their experience and make it easier to understand your point.
A logo is the one image you will find on almost all company websites. On your own site, you should feature your logo in the same place on all pages. This does a few important things. First, it helps visitors quickly identify your site and everything associated with your company. It reminds visitors where they are and removes any confusion about if they’re still in the right place.
For maximum effectiveness, place your logo in the same spot, preferably near the top of your page. Make your logo clickable so users can be redirected back to the home page at any time. If you want, you can also just make the logo redirect viewers back to the website section’s home page. For example, if they’re browsing specific services, customize the logo to say “services” and make the logo clickable to redirect them to the services home page.
Including statistics and studies will boost your credibility and add weight to any claims you make on your site. But people will appreciate the information more if you design a visual aid to accompany it.
Infographics are just graphical representations of information. They can be simple graphs that illustrate data. But you can get very creative with your infographic’s design.
Good infographic design can be used to draw attention to the data that you want viewers to remember the most. So, make infographics for the information you want them to notice and remember.
When a customer visits your site, regardless of what device they’re browsing on, they will notice image quality. The easiest way to ruin your images’ appearances is to inappropriately resize them.
If you need to resize photos on your site, it’s usually better to use a professional tool. You can maintain an image’s appearance while reducing its size more easily. But you need to be careful when you’re trying to increase their sizes.
Design Wizard has a free image resizing tool you can use. You can also find all the most common image sizes for the most common templates. That includes Facebook banner and ad image sizes and all the most common banner sizes throughout the internet. If you’d prefer, you can also manually input the pixel values you want.
Images also need to fit on different screens. If your design was made for a full-size desktop, you need to make sure it will respond nicely on a smaller device. If you don’t, users won’t have the same experience on different devices.
Pay attention to each photos’ resolution. The resolution might not be important when you crop a photo, but it will if you’re resizing it.
Ideally, all your desktop photos will have a density of 72 Dots Per square Inch (DPI). The challenge is maintaining that same quality when you resize it. Avoid posting distorted photos on your site by mistake.
“Banner Blindness” is a strange phenomenon. Users on websites will often ignore banner-like imagery. We’re not sure if it’s an active or subconscious decision, but marketers have been dealing with it for a while. Fortunately, they’ve already found a few solutions for you.
Beyond placement, banner blindness can be defeated by sticking to only the most relevant content. If you sell to business professionals, use business images that are directly related to what you sell.
Next, prepare your banner ad images and other banners for mobile users. Mobile users will have a completely different experience with your banners. If you’ve ever browsed sites on your phone, you know that it’s easy to get frustrated by inappropriately formatted images.
Lastly, experiment. It’s important to test new images and sizes. A change in your approach might be the key to nailing your website design. Try different stock images, play around with their locations on your page, and try optimizing them for SEO.
You can help fight banner blindness and your site’s overall presence online with a few extra steps with your images. Add alt text to your images that is relevant to the content of your page.
Using the right alt text is good for multiple organic marketing functions. First of all, it’s easier for people to stumble into your site when looking for images on Google. The alt text should match the most important text in your page’s content.
If you add relevant alt text, your visibility on Google’s “All” search engine will also improve. So, use alt text and take advantage of captions and buttons while you’re at it.
Integration is one of the most effective ways for a user to interact with images. Clickable images can have amazing results, even just for navigation. Instead of just using text, let your images take visitors to your home page, search page, and any relevant page on your site.
Remember that when you look for images online, you need to make sure you’re not using copyrighted material without permission. If you’re looking for images, or even just templates, with a Google search, you risk copyright infringement if you’re not careful. Normally, the highest quality images will be actively protected with the enforcement of copyright law.
The good news is you can quickly and easily gain permission to download, edit, and use thousands of high-quality images. PikWizard is a free source of high-quality imagery. You can download and use many images for free. Then, you can even edit your favourite images for free.
Stock photos are the easiest place to start if you need images for web design. PikWizard has a vast library of stock photos for dozens of categories.
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