Images are an important part of website development. No website is complete without right images. How your website uses images plays a big role in determining the UX on your website. Images can make and break your content. When used right, it can add to your content and make it more engaging. On the other hand, if you don’t use your images right, your content can fall apart. Hence, today we’re going to talk about the best ways to use images in your website design.
Human mind perceives and interprets images faster than written text. This is why images are essentially used in communicating a product, service, or a brand. An image can convey information worth many words within seconds. Not only that but images also help give depth and prove context for a story or a description.
Therefore, if you want to keep visitors interested in your site, images are essential. That being said, let’s talk about…
Best Ways to Use Images in your Website Design
#1. It’s always best to use original images
Using original images can help your website and content appear more authentic. This doesn’t mean that it is bad or wrong to use stock images. It’s just that using original images is always better.
When your visitors see authentic and original images on your website, they’d be able to trust it better. As a result, they would like to engage further with your business.
Websites that uses only stock images can look spammy and fake. Therefore, it is important to have the right amount of original images on your website.
For this, you can simply click photos of your products, staff, and business place. This can help your leads and customers understand your business better.
#2. Take care of cropping and rescaling
To fit in different screens, your images will be cropped. Like a full-sized image on desktop may appear half on mobile screen. Therefore, you need to make sure that all visitors (be it mobile or desktop users), have the same experience with our image. You need to make sure that regardless of the screen, the cropping doesn’t affect the quality of your image.
Moreover, some images may be too big for your website. In that case, you will need to resize them in order to make them fit into a smaller screen. You may also need to crop some images.
Also, maintaining the resolution of image is important. A poor resolution image may leave a poor mark. Hence, this is something you need to take care while rescaling your images. Although this isn’t something you’d need to worry about when cropping your image.
#3. Use only relevant images
How many times you have visited a website and have found images on it that are irrelevant to their subject? You must know that looks very untasteful. Moreover, doing something like this makes you appear unprofessional. There’s a big chance that visitor might not even read your content if they think the image used is unrelated to the subject.
Therefore, you should not use images just because they look good. Make sure whatever image you use only adds to your subject matter. Remember, images are used to add more depth in your written content. Hence, use only relevant images.
#4. Images doesn’t mean just photos
Images don’t just mean camera-clicked photos. It can be a lot more.
You could use various sorts of infographics. Many businesses use them to represent various sorts of data, statistics, facts, and so on. In fact, as a business, you must use infographics. Such images help make even the most complex of information easy to understand.
Hence, with the help of infographics, you can make sure that your audience get the most from your content.
#5. Use multiple images for a single product
If yours is an E-Commerce website selling products, this point is very important for you. Images are a very crucial part of online shopping. It greatly decides whether a customer will purchase the product or not.
A poor product image can cause the customer to go away. But that is not all. It is not just about having quality image for your product. The number of images also matter.
Just one or two images won’t be really useful in helping a customer make the right decision. If a customer doesn’t feel enough assured of what the product actually looks like, they might not make the purchase. Or even worse, they may get disappointed upon receiving the product.
Hence, it is important to make sure that you use multiple images which show different aspects and dimensions of your product.
#6. Don’t forget to optimize images
Image optimization is another important thing. It is crucial for many reasons.
Optimized images help check the load time of the web page along with maintaining the quality of the image. All of this eventually improves the UX on your website. Moreover, it also adds to Search Engine Optimization and helps a site rank better.
You can optimize the images on your website by taking care of the following things:
- File name
- Alt attributes
- File type
- Image dimensions and angles
- Size of the image
- Optimizing thumbnails
…and so on.
By taking care of these aspects, you will be able to effectively optimize images in your website.
#7. Use symbols and icons
Now you know that images should be used in a way that it complements your content. In such a case, using symbols and icons can be really helpful. They can help make your website’s elements easy to understand.
Symbols and icons generally have a predefined meaning to them. For example, when you see a magnifying glass on a website, you know it denotes “search.” Similarly, a hut-shaped icon would denote “homepage.”
Therefore, to get the best out of your images, you should use them as icons and symbols where-ever you see a scope in your website. However, you should not over-do it.
Final Word
Images are an indispensable part of website development. They help make a site more engaging and meaningful. Hence, it is important to use images in your website design with due care. Images can both make and break your website. While nicely deployed images can improve the UX of your website, poor images can ruin it. Therefore, you should follow the tips as mentioned above. Following these tactics will help you maintain the quality of your images without having to compromise the functionality of your website. All of this boils down to just a couple of things. For a great UX, images should be optimized in a way that they provide a quality experience on all devices while not slowing down the webpage at all.
