Category: Photography

One of the challenges that organizations of all shapes and sizes frequently face is getting good pictures to go with their web site design. Good images can draw in your audience but a missing or poorly displayed image risks damaging your credibility.

Frequently organizations fall in love with a site design that includes excellent pictures on every page. Each story in the design has a wonderful supporting image to highlight a person, place, or topic. Landing pages may have main images with carefully placed text and overlays to help draw the eye and keep people’s attention. Those designs and images may be great, but only if you provide new images as fast as you create new pages (often faster).

Much of the time I worked for AFSC we were lucky to have an in-house photographer. Terry Foss traveled around the world to visit, get to know, and photograph AFSC’s programs and he provided us with excellent pictures for nearly every area of our work. But even then we still had challenges getting the exact picture we wanted for the story we needed to tell the moment we wanted to tell it. In addition to his wonderful images we would dig in the archives, beg local program staff to send us more images, and sometimes we end up taking a picture of an intern’s hand or other acts of desperation.

Web designers have to make many assumptions when they design a site and one of the most important practical issues is the quality and quantity of art the client can provide. The more prominent and plentiful the image use, the more specific questions have to get; sometimes down to the level of aspect ratios and staff image editing skill level. Good designers use this information to help make sure the images in their designs are the kinds of images you can routinely provide. You should know what those assumptions are and make sure you can follow through over time.

When you first launch a site this isn’t usually a problem. A lot of time will go into the stories and images that are included during the build and migration so the initially launched site should be at least as wonderful as the designs.

But as time passes the constant need to specific kinds of images may become a burden. You will soon realize there are places that images are required for technical or stylistic reasons. Some images will have text overlays that mean the subject needs to be on the right or the left. Some spaces will be very large or very small, which impacts what subjects work well. Some will be surrounded by a background color or pattern that may clash with an otherwise ideal photograph. The more you understand this while working with your designer the more you’ll love your new site.

We had to photograph an intern’s hand because at the time our home page would break if every story didn’t have an image – it was a design and technical requirement. A few months after we launched we needed to post a statement that required home page placement, but the statement had no image to go with it. I had no budget to buy a stock image and the program had no appropriate picture we could use, so one of our team members grabbed his camera and an intern and quickly shot a few pictures of the young man’s hand holding a pen. We ended up using that hand image for several statements after that as well.

So here are a few quick guidelines for making sure your web site isn’t held back by a need for art you can’t consistently provide:

1. Make sure you have a plan for getting new pictures. There are many ways to do this so having a plan is more important that its details. It can be a staff photographer, freelance photographers, volunteer photographers, an organization owned camera that staff use, or a budget for stock photographs. The best plans are usually some combination of all these pieces.
2. Talk with the site designer and make sure they know what you are able to provide before they start the design. Will you be able to ensure pictures for every story, blog post, and event? Do you have editorial standards about the use of images of program participants, volunteers, and staff? Does your stock image budget allow you to fill any gaps, or can you create a picture of an intern writing a statement from thin air? Can you edit those pictures to work in a variety of spaces and sizes, or do you need to assume the pictures get uploaded more or less they way they come off your camera?
3. When you start to see designs ask your web development partners lots of questions and document their answers. Ask about every image you see in the designs. For every single image you should know what size it needs to be, how it gets loaded and changed, if is required or optional (and how things look if it’s not present), and if it requires some kind of preprocessing for an overlay or other visual effect. Make sure you understand the purpose and details for every image they show you.
4. Try lots of variations when the site is still under development. Upload great images, terrible images, images that seem too big and too small, a sunset over a field, an ocean scene, a portrait of a baby, a team group shot, fluffy animals, flowers, and anything else you have around your computer. For each spot you can put a picture try each image and see what works and what doesn’t. No design can handle any image of any size and description equally well so make sure you understand, and can live with, the limits imposed by the design of your site.

Finally, make sure you actually follow the plan or fix it. Having a camera is only useful if someone is comfortable using it. Volunteers may not provide what you need in time to be useful or may forget to sign the releases your board requires. Budgets get cut or adjusted over time and may no longer really meet your needs. When the rubber meets the road your plan may not always work, don’t panic, just fix it. The reason you took all those notes about what you need is so that when you adjust your plan you will already know what it needs to provide to make your site successful.