Whether your business is online or a brick-and-mortar your website is key to telling people about who you are, what you do, and how you can help. This website is a reflection of your brand, your business, and your overall style. Having a great website combines great design, including fonts, colors, and layout. It should also include great content, from text for visitors to read, videos for visitors to watch and learn from, and compelling graphics to see. In this post, I’ll share with you ways in which you can create great website photos.
Create a Graphic Standard for Your Website Photos
Before you get started you’ll want to decide on some sort of graphic standard for all the website photos you’ll create. Essentially you’re making decisions on how your images will look across the board by creating rules to follow. These might be:
- Fonts to use for title, subheading, and body text
- Dimensions of images for blog post titles and other types of pictures
- Colors for certain elements like text
Choose the Right Tools
Next, you’ll need the appropriate tool to create your website photos. While in the old days you needed a rather large program and the expertise to use it, nowadays there are several programs that you can use for free and don’t require you to have a lot of technical know-how.A few of them are:
Canva
Canva is my personal favorite. It is totally online so you can create website photos from anywhere you have access to the internet. What’s nice about Canva is that they already have dimensions of popular graphics created these days like social media graphics for Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and others as well as blog post titles and general images. You are allowed to import your own photos and stock photography to use in your images, and if you need to search stock photography for your images you can purchase their images for $1.00 each and you can reuse those purchased items in future work.
Adobe Spark
Adobe Spark is a new tool to create graphics online for free. It allows you to create website photos, posts (like a blog post entry), and videos. Adobe spark works in a similar fashion but where Canva seems to concentrate more on the type of graphic you make, Adobe spark seems to be more text centric. It asks, what do you want to say, and then where do you want to say it (which social media platform, blog post, etc.)
Adobe Photoshop
Photoshop is the industry standard for image creation and photo manipulation. While I prefer using Canva (and will probably start using Adobe Spark more often now) I still find myself using Photoshop for some website photos. I find I can’t knock out backgrounds on some photos for use in other graphics on Canva so I still turn to my trusty Photoshop. It’s the industry standard for a reason and for most graphic work it is way too powerful but I would suggest everyone be at least familiar with it for future use.
Save Those Photos for Future Use
Finally, you’ll want to keep those website photos safe for reuse. With all this hard work you do to create images for your website you’ll want to make sure that those images are available in an archive or some other space. You could save them all on a local folder on a computer, but I would suggest you back them up on a cloud storage device like one of these below:
That way you can always have a copy accessible no matter where you are. Some services are free while some charge a monthly fee.
Conclusion
Creating website photos for your business website is a great way to increase and enforce your brand. You should create graphics for your blog, social media, and email marketing messages. Fortunately there are a few tools you can use to create them and they are easy to use.
How do you create graphics for your business? What other tools are there that you like? Let us know in the comments below