We’ve all heard the saying that a ‘picture is worth a thousand words’ right? I mean where would we be without the illustrated steps we’re given to help us assemble some complicated flat-packed furniture from that blue and yellow store we all know so well? And who could physically digest one of the weekend broadsheets without some compelling or illustrative photography to help quickly engage with the information we are most interested in?
Delivering the difference…
The use of engaging visual media such as high-quality photographs, graphics and video are not only capable of doing a lot of the talking for you, but will make the user or visitor experience more palatable and far richer.
The information market is such a crowded and competitive place nowadays so anything that can help you capture a visitors attention for more than 30 seconds is an achievement and a well-chosen image can go a long way to that end. Especially if you have large amounts of information to get across, the sparing but deliberate use of images can make it much more digestible and memorable.
Go easy on the pepper though!
You should aim for quality, not quantity. If you have lots of images you want to share think about organising them into a gallery where they can be viewed easily by navigating left and right in an image browser, or have a dedicated ‘Gallery’ or ‘Portfolio’ page where your great pictures can be viewed without heaps of scrolling.
Don’t undersell yourself with poor quality
You may find you want to buy high-quality royalty-free images if the ones you have don’t portray you in a professional light. There are dozens of online image libraries that allow you to buy images for pence rather pounds and the added impact of a professionally shot or designed image can give is well worth the relatively small outlay.
Enhance the images you have
Again, quality is king. I think most of us can recognise when a picture appears too dark or when a portion of the image isn’t desirable and would benefit from some brightening up or cropping. The good news is most digital photographs (taken with a half decent camera) can be dramatically improved without in-depth knowledge of expensive photo-editing software.
To give your images the boost they need have a play with this great online image-editing tool at www.pixlr.com (http://pixlr.com/). It’s a simple piece of kit and its free! You can’t say fairer than that. So, have a play and get in the habit of portraying yourself in the best possible light. There really is no excuse for displaying amateur images on your website anymore.
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Pictures are not the final word for enhancing your media offering…
Another great reason for using visual media to pepper your web content is images and video are now the bedrock of the social media world. Therefore, the images you choose for your blog content matter, especially since most social networks automatically pull in images with the links people share. So spend some time on image selection and choose something that is both relevant to your content and appealing to your audience.
Adding some simple social share links to accompany them is a great way to increase click-throughs to your website and further awareness of your brand.
