You need images on your website for a couple major reasons. For starters, images add to your overall credibility. Website visitors make judgments about you and your website in just a matter of seconds. In that small amount of time, you need to show off your professionalism.
If you want people to take your website serious, you need to show them you are serious about the site. Including images in your content is one way to do this and adapt to how people view websites.
Not only do images help your overall appearance and credibility, but including them helps break up your content. This helps make your content more scannable.
People simply will not read large blocks of text. But if you insert a couple images on the page, you will help guide a reader through the material.
People are attracted to images. They grab attention. Also, visual elements like images can often say something that words struggle to say.
There are many website with free images, but the best source is stock.xchng. This is a free image library with over 1 million pictures. You can either browse images based on categories and sub-categories, or do a simple search if you aren’t exactly sure what you’re looking for.
If you want to image that demonstrates success, try simply typing “success” in the search bar at stock.xchang and you’ll pull up hundreds of pictures. Almost all images on Elementary Marketing come from that website.
To use an image, upload a picture into your files and do not just link to them. Many people link to images instead of self-hosting them, and this creates all kinds of problems.
Ever been on a website and instead of seeing an image, you saw a little box with a red x? That is one of the problems when people link to an image and the person actually hosting the image has moved it.
Make sure the image you are using is not too large, or it can slow down the time it takes to load your page. And you don’t want to test the patience of your users.
Tags: website design, stock images, free pictures, writing content
Like the blog? Buy the book.
