Importance of Stock Images for Website Development
Any engaging website has a prerequisite – interesting images that grab your attention as soon as the websites opens before your eyes. An image locks the attention sooner than words do. It is a fact that viewers would read the content attached to an image before they would read other content on the site. Read on to find out what good stock images can do for your website.
Remember the time when we were kids? What were the books you loved – the one with colorful pictures, or the one with no pictures at all? As kids, when there were a lot of things that attracted our attention, books were made colorful and full of pictures to keep us interested. While creating a website, it is the same dynamics that come into play when our aim is to attract the attention of the viewer. When there are thousands other websites ready to grab their attention, what would keep them glued to your website – the images that you use.
The best websites let their images do the talking – it is no surprise that websites for companies like Apple feature the images of their products on the greater part of the page, capturing the attention of the viewer with the simplicity and clarity of their images.
Addition of stock images makes your website:
Concise: Presenting information to your viewers in a visual manner makes it easy to be absorbed. Instead of getting lost in heaps of words, viewers would easily find what they want, which will keep them bringing back to your site. It is a more professional way of interacting where maximum communication happens in minimum time.
Shareable: Pictures that look good would get shared. And that is free advertising. Since pictures speak louder than words, your product will have more marketing value than writing about it would ever give. The popularity of sites like Pinterest speaks for the charm of enticing images.
Value added: Descriptions without images tend to get boring, and viewers getting bored with a site is the last thing any developer would want. Images add value to the content and give it more credibility. It is easier for people to relate to what they see than what they read.
Search engine friendly: A clear alt tag with precise keywords is all you need to make your image search engine friendly. With Universal Search Results bringing images to the main page of search results in Google, smartly tagged images can bring more traffic to your site.
If you cannot have your own photos for your site, a lot of royalty free images can be found through content libraries such as vpuzzler.com. The good thing about royalty free images is that they can be produced multiple times with a one-time fee. Therefore, it reduces your budget while giving you images one wouldn’t find elsewhere. You can also look for free images that are available on sites like shutterstock.com.
Let us know what you think about the use of images for a website. Share your views through the comments section.
