The Importance of Website Images
Your website is all about making a good impression. Whenever someone visits your website, they are getting a sense of your brand and this sense can play a large role in determining whether or not that person becomes a customer. Many companies spend hours focusing on their copywriting or their calls to action, when the problem is really the images they are using – or not using.
Images play an important role on websites, so you won’t want to ignore how you’re using yours. A proper brand guide can help you identify the correct types of images to utilize in your marketing materials. Below are just a few ways that images have an impact on your visitors:
Images Help to Build Trust
For starters, images can build up trust with your customers. Let’s say you were selling a brand new product on your website. Which do you think would get better results – a page with a picture of the product, or a page with no picture? Showing the product helps the customer to visualize it, and let’s them see that it is in fact real.
In addition to this, showing pictures of your team or the founder of the company also helps to establish trust. It puts a face to the company and let’s the customers know there is an actual human being behind all of this. Even if we don’t know them personally, getting to see the people running the business helps to establish some level of trust.
Images Help to Convey Information Faster
People are impatient, especially when they are shopping online. If you don’t provide them with the information they need quickly, they’re likely to simply leave your site and try another. With that in mind, you need to get information to your visitors as quickly as you can so that they can decide whether or not they want your product or service.
Why spend several paragraphs describing how a product looks when you can simply show an image? This conveys a lot more information and it does it faster. You can also use images to display things like graphs and infographics, which are able to convey large amounts of information quickly and simply.
Easily Communicate Emotions Using Images
Sometimes it’s hard to describe certain emotions. If there’s a certain emotion you want to go along with your product, including an image can go a long way towards conveying it. For instance, let’s say you sell kids toys. Rather than describing how happy a kid would be to get that toy, an image of a happy child playing with it would do a lot better. The saying goes that “a picture is worth a thousand words” – keep this in mind when trying to figure out how to best pass on a certain emotion to your visitors
Images Improve Content Layout
Finally, images simply make your pages look better. If you went to visit a site and it was just a long block of text, you would probably get tired of reading it. Rather than doing this to your visitors, break up long sections of text with relevant images. This will give their eyes a break from reading as they scroll, make the page look better, and convey information/emotions all at the same time.
Create An Impact With Images
By now you should see why images are important in websites. From conveying information, to evoking emotions, to establishing trust, images play a vital role on all websites. If you have a website that isn’t performing as well as you’d like, you may want to consider adding more images or which images you are already using. To find out more about the impact images can have on your site, speak to our Digital Marketing & Design team at Creative MMS.
