When a website is rebuilt, the conversation usually starts with design, copy and features. Pictures come later – and are then expected to fit formats they were never taken for. The result is hard cropping, mismatched frames, or stock images in the most important places.
A photo production for a website should therefore be prepared against the planned page structure.
Home page: one picture with a clear job
The lead image does not have to explain every service at once. It should carry the character of the company and leave enough calm space for the headline and the buttons. Depending on the layout, desktop, tablet and mobile crops are all needed.
Services: real work instead of symbolic pictures
On service pages, pictures make a process easier to understand. Real working situations, products, rooms and details do that. They show what a client actually gets instead of illustrating the topic in general terms.
About and team
Beside a consistent set of portraits, wider frames are worth having: conversations, people working together, the workplace and its surroundings. The company reads as more personal without everyone having to produce a staged smile.
Recruiting
Applicants want to see what a workplace really looks like. Real employees, real rooms and typical situations are more credible than generic office pictures. The production should show the working day at its best without making it artificial.
Press and contact
The basics are current portraits of the management, pictures of the location and neutral frames with room for design. An exterior view, the entrance and the people to talk to can also help on a contact page.
The technical planning
For every important situation, several crops should be planned:
- landscape for website and presentations,
- portrait for social media,
- a square crop for profiles,
- frames with space left free for text,
- files for the web and for high-resolution use.
Shooting and later use belong together
Working in photography, film, layout and my own software development, I know both sides: the shot and what happens to it inside a digital product. So where a picture will sit is settled before the shoot – not when it is being placed into the website.
Around 340 examples from corporate, hotel, restaurant and event productions are under projects.
