Website photography needs to get real

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Invest in good photography, is Jakob Nielsen’s advice to website owners. Internet users are already being flooded with “fluff” and don’t engage with generic images of people or products.

Instead, browsers want to glean information from images. For instance, on company blogs they want to see a portrait of the actual writer – not stock photography. The same goes for staff profiles and customer contact staff.

For product sales it’s the same – consumers want to see the actual products, not a one-size-fits-all photo that gives them little visual feedback.

Nielsen demonstrates the difference by using eye-tracking plots from Amazon, who use generic images for some products, and Pottery Barn, who use well-staged images of actual items.

If generic product photography must be used, it’s safe to say your product descriptions will need to work much, much harder to make the sale.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kristina Knight-1
Kristina Knight, Journalist , BA
Content Writer & Editor
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Kristina Knight is a freelance writer with more than 15 years of experience writing on varied topics. Kristina’s focus for the past 10 years has been the small business, online marketing, and banking sectors, however, she keeps things interesting by writing about her experiences as an adoptive mom, parenting, and education issues. Kristina’s work has appeared with BizReport.com, NBC News, Soaps.com, DisasterNewsNetwork, and many more publications.