An effective professional website contains several important factors, starting with:
- Eye-catching design
- Engaging content
- Call-to-action buttons
- User-friendly navigation
A critical but rarely-mentioned element is image selection. Some website agencies jam stock images into the websites they build. Stock images can get the job done, but the love just doesn’t show.
Even great stock images lose their power when they appear over and over again on websites and in ads. They can also come across as cold and generic, with no personal connection to the business or service they are meant to illustrate. That is why we always ask our clients for photos of their staff members, their location, or scenes that show their business environment. A website should showcase a client’s culture as well as its business or product. For ecommerce websites where products are being sold, a valuable feature would be rich images including a 360-degree rotation of the product, plus a video that gives potential customers the fullest possible virtual experience.
Producing great images, however, takes commitment. This means that each one must be photographed at high resolution in an eye-catching way. The in-house web designers at DesignHouse require images to be at least 72 dpi with a minimum of 1000 pixels wide. Remember, images can be made smaller, but they can never be made larger once they have been sized down because they lose the resolution quality. If the image is too low-resolution, we just won’t use it, because nothing is more annoying on a website than a low-res or tiny image that you can barely see.
By: Liz Rodriguez