Photographs of your actual work make more difference to how a site lands than anything else you can supply. A good layout with real photos beats a great layout with stock every time.
What works
Your actual work, finished. The kitchen you fitted. The garden you planted. The plate you sent out. Shot in daylight, in focus, straight on.
Your premises. The shop front, the workshop, the treatment room. People want to know what they are walking into.
You and your team. Not stiff studio portraits — people working, or a straightforward photo of the person who will turn up.
Before and after pairs. For any trade where the transformation is the selling point, these do enormous work.
What does not work
- Photos taken at night with a flash
- Anything with a customer’s face in it unless you have their permission in writing
- Screenshots of your Instagram
- Pictures where the interesting bit is a small part of a big frame
- Heavy filters
Practical advice for phone photos
A modern phone is completely adequate. The things that actually matter:
- Shoot in daylight. Near a window or outdoors. Indoor electric light makes everything look yellow and cheap.
- Wipe the lens. It is in your pocket all day. This one tip fixes more bad photos than anything else.
- Hold it level. Straight lines that lean look amateurish.
- Get closer. Fill the frame with the subject.
- Take ten, send three. Choose the best rather than sending everything.
- Landscape, mostly. Wide photos fit website layouts better than tall ones.
How many?
Six to ten good ones is enough for many small-business sites, but a portfolio-led business may benefit from more. Twenty mediocre ones is worse than six good ones — we will only use the good ones anyway, and it takes longer.
What if I have none?
We use professionally licensed stock photography chosen to suit your trade and your chosen style. It will look perfectly good.
It will not, however, look like you. Stock photos of “a builder” look like stock photos of a builder, and visitors register that at some level even if they could not tell you why.
If you can get real photos in the next week, it is worth the wait. If you cannot, we will build the site with stock and you can send photos later — swapping them in afterwards is a straightforward revision.
Copyright
Only send photos you took or own. Do not send images from a supplier’s catalogue, a competitor’s website, or a Google image search.
We are the ones publishing them, but you are the one confirming you have the right to use them, and a copyright complaint is a genuinely expensive thing to be on the wrong end of.