A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the use of staff images on websites and questioned whether their inclusion made a difference to sales. I also mentioned that those companies who did employ staff images did so because they believe it helps in forging stronger business relationships. Today’s post concerns the effects of generic website images, or more specifically, whether they actually engage visitors or turn them off?
Wide Choice
There’s no doubt that stock images is big business and there’s certainly no shortage of companies supplying them as a look around the web will prove. However, with the millions of websites out there, visitors often come across images that appear to have no connection with the website’s products or services.
A View
Website consultant and analyst Jakob Nielson believes that website images should be visual information providers that tell visitors about products and services at a glance, not just pretty pictures to fill whitespace.
‘The commonality across all of these examples … is that users pay attention to information-carrying images that show content that’s relevant to the task at hand. And users ignore purely decorative images that don’t add real content to the page. So much fluff — of which there’s too much already on the Web’.
Whether he’s right or not is purely a matter of opinion, but if this is indeed the case and generic images actually do more harm than good – what’s the alternative?
Original Images
The obvious solution would be for web designers to create their own website images for each individual project; a good idea in principle but not without its drawbacks.
Web designers often work to tight schedules, so even assuming they had some photography skills and possessed a camera capable of taking high quality photos, finding the time to do so could prove extremely difficult.
In addition to tight schedules, designers often have to work to tight budgets, most of which would be highly unlikely to cover the fees of a professional photographer or even the cost of designers doing it themselves.
There are of course some companies who supply their web designers with their own images, something which is perhaps a good alternative as long as they are of a quality fit for a web page
However, the bottom line is that for the majority of cash-strapped businesses, especially new start-ups and SMEs, stock images are the only option, but I guess the secret of getting them to work well is to be extremely selective with the choice. Thoughts anyone?
Until next time.
