Add Polish With More Pictures and Diagrams

Go with more. Always take more pictures than you think you need. Many will be useless and only when you take several (25-50) will you get ones that are great. Pictures and diagrams catch the eye and make a site look polished. They also make pages look more readable when a page is full of text. Make sure your pictures and diagrams are high quality (at least medium resolution on most digital cameras - pictures should be 1,000 KB minimum when saved to a computer). The images should help tell your story and show off what you have. Try to use captions - they keep the potential customer on your site longer. The longer a potential customer is on the site the longer your brand is in front of them. The following are a few ideas for different industries.

Restaurants

Have a pro take the pictures of your food, or, if you don'’t want to hire a pro, take pictures of people in your establishment instead of the food. Take pictures when your establishment is full of people, potential customers love to see a lot of people inside a restaurant. People even love to wait, look at the Cheesecake Factory - people love to sit around for an hour to eat there. If you have multiple locations take pictures of all of the locations. People may walk by one of your locations everyday but not notice it. Someone emails them a link to your restaurant site and presto - a new customer.

Product Companies

Diagrams are great on a website, just like they are great in a presentation. For organizations with durable goods, potential customers need to see pictures. This is especially true if you a smaller company - how are you going to get someone to buy your product otherwise? Take shots from many angles. I just bought a house and so did many of my friends (who are not web developers). If they didn't have pictures of the houses or apartments most of us never bothered to check out those listings. I didn't even use my broker's website because their listings brought up pictures only on the details page. The extra click to go look at the pictures wasted too much time. Did you ever notice that companies that have really nice websites (Best Buy, CNET, Sprint) have a mass of pictures?

Service Companies

Why not put up some pictures of your staff? For other pictures around the site pick out pictures that match your type of business - buy some pictures from Getty Images or another of the major less expensive photo repositories (stockexpert or dreamstime). If you're trying to save money, hire a college photography major to take some pictures of your people in meetings or working in small teams. Give him or her a credit on your site and write a story about it that you can post - a little community involvement goes a long way too. Use diagrams too. Not really sure why, but everyone stops to figure out a diagram. Make sure it has a caption or a mouse over explanation. You probably already have a good diagram that would be a useful way to sell your company.

Just thought of this so I am adding it now (last second). If you're a carpenter, awning installer or landscaper the time is now to get a website up with lots of pictures of the designs you created and maintain. Not many of your peers have sites, so it would be very advantageous to be the first. Architects should put up as many pictures of your work as possible. If you have worked in different industries (homes, government & commercial) make sure you split your work up on your site so it is easy to understand and navigate.

Clubs and Professional Organizations

Take a digital camera to every event and program. Take shots of your colleagues and put them up on the site. The more pictures the better - they will help attract new members, especially if you look like you’re having a good time networking or learning something new. For big annual meetings or awards presentations hire a professional, but make sure they make the pictures available to your web developers.

Magazines

Clearly it depends on the type of magazine, but if it is a situation where you have a good amount of pictures in your magazine make more of them available online. Make some available for free and others in a subscribers only area to give the potential customer a reason to subscribe right now. If you're really ambitious think about creating a web only subscription base - it will save your periodical a good amount of money on print and mail costs.

Summary

With the advent of digital cameras it costs so little now to take great pictures. Well, good pictures anyway. So take more and put them up on your website. If you have a bunch it does't hurt to keep updating them too, but if you have some that really connect to your clientèle don't rotate those out. Change for the sake of change is not a good idea. Let your accountant or your website statistics tell you when its time to change your marketing.