Breaking Down My Freebie, The Ultimate Checklist To Getting Your Website Started:

Have you ever gone to a website and you see these beautiful professional photos, but as you scroll down they take forever to load?

Or as you start scrolling down they become so pixelated and grainy that you can barely make them out to what they are supposed to be? As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to start breaking down the freebie that I offer and talk about each point in more detail than provided. The second point of my freebie talks about pictures and the use of professional or stock photos and why. Some other points I want to touch upon are that photos should be 500kb or less and how renaming your photos can help with your overall SEO. Again if you haven’t downloaded the checklist yet, download it here The Ultimate Checklist to Getting Your Website Started, click the link above or enter your email in the box below!

Use Of A Professional Branding Photoshoot: 

Professional pictures are an absolute game-changer for your website! I will point out though that having a professional brand photoshoot is a great way to create consistency throughout the site. A photographer can really capture those moments for your brand that you may not think to take. They know how to stay within the brand voice but also capture your good side. This is why you pay a photographer the big bucks, they are great at their job! Another great reason to hire a photographer is that they can take headshots of you, but also some mini stock photos here and there. They make the photos look clean and cohesive with the same editing style across the site. If you are looking for someone to put a brand photoshoot together I know of two local photographers here in the Bay Area, California. Sherri LaRocque Photography is an amazing wedding photographer. I love her style and editing skills! Recently she just announced that she is launching Branding Sessions. In her description for the program she states “This is for anyone, whether your a photographer, designer, influencer, hairstylist, etc, you can book this session. This includes a logo, portraits of yourself and craft, template help, and so much more!” With her brand aesthetic, I know that this will be an amazing session and I may just have to take her up on it! I mean if you haven’t updated things in a little over a year, it’s time. Another amazing photographer is Jen Vazquez. She offers four different branding session opportunities where she will help you decide what your branding voice can be and what photos will fit the lifestyle of your ideal client. On her website, she talks about “creating a session outline and shot list curated to you and your business.” She also is a Pinterest expert so I know she would be great at providing you with all different types of images!

Honestly, I will say that if you are on a tight budget within that first year of launching your website use an iPhone. These cameras have become so good over these past few years that you can totally get away with using some of those photos.

Finally, finding stock photos on a website is great, but the branding will be consistent if you are taking these photos all in one. Now you may be thinking, ‘Great, but how can I find stock photos?” Well, I’m glad you asked because that brings us to our next point! 

Stock Photo Use And My Love For Social Squares

There are many options out there for stock photos, free versions, and paid ones. Both can be great options, so first I’ll take you through the most popular, Unsplash stock photos. Their tagline is ‘beautiful, free photos. Unsplash is the internet’s source of freely usable images”. Truly, their photos are beautiful and probably the most popular free stock photo option for anyone who is building a website. They have so many options, not just stock photos but headshot-type photos, landscapes, artistic shots, everything under the sun! You just need to know what you are looking for before you fall into the deep dark hole searching for hours (not that this is coming from a personal story or anything). 

However, my tried and true place to get stock photos from is Social Squares. As much as free is great, I love the curated style of Social Squares. It is also a female-founded company that features the best brand photographers and over 6,000 images! One thing I find is worth my money in this membership is that you don’t just get access to amazing stock photos, but online teaching, a private Facebook group with other creatives, the owners, and employees themselves. They also started to provide monthly captions and prompts for your social media posts allowing you to cut your content creation time in half. This last Christmas the owners decided to host a virtual Christmas party on Zoom and it made the company feel closer to you as an individual. I highly recommend them if you are looking for something that has a little more community surrounding your online presence.

Photos Should Be 500kb Or Less

If you ever go on a site and it takes forever to load the pictures being used could have too large of file size. There are many ways to change this which I go over in a past blog, but I’ll reiterate the steps here. The fastest way to scale your photo size to 500kb or less is to resize the image on your desktop and make sure it is a JPG over a PNG. PNG file sizes are higher because the image holds a crisper look, taking up more file space. If you are just using the photo on your website try to change the size to 1200x1500. If you are using the photo as a banner image try 2000x1500. If you try both of those methods and it still doesn’t work, try compressing your photo online. The two sites I like to use are CloudPressso and TinyPNG. Compressing photos can usually take your file storage down significantly! This is always my last solution because it does take some time to compress the photos. Overall you want to have your site photos looking nice, so if these image qualities are going down significantly I would try using a different photo or testing some different methods to resize things.

Another way I went around using a compressor is I used Canva to compress my photos. I tried to find a size file that I wanted my image to be, like a square Instagram size, and placed my photo in there. This helped size my photo to the correct dimensions and decreased my file size significantly. As I stated before this is a backward way and doesn't always work out in my favor but it never hurts to try! 

Renaming Your Photos For SEO Purposing

My final tip for getting the perfect images on your site is don’t forget to rename them for SEO purposing. This is one of my favorite tips and methods because it is so simple! The reason for renaming these photos is so that Google can ‘read’ them and know what keywords that photo is serving. No one is typing in IM890 into their Google search engine so how can it tell what photo goes with what topic? For example, any photo that I put on this blog post will have the same curated title words as the photo name. It is simple as that. The other great thing about this tip is that you don’t have to rename the photo in your file, but you can name it in Squarespace itself. Again if you want to see photo examples head to one of my past blogs.

My final nugget of knowledge with this is that if you are working with a Web Designer make sure they know what the picture means. I’ve created some portfolios for people and sometimes I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say about the picture. Like I stated before, Google needs to ‘read’ your photos so the designer needs to accurately describe what your photo is about. The one thing you need to avoid though is stuffing your photo with only keywords that it doesn’t make sense. Instead of ‘social media-blog post-picture ideas- tips’ say, ‘Dominiques blog post on photo tips for your Squarespace website’. Google likes the second option because it actually sounds like a sentence instead of a bot. 

These are just some of my tips for getting your photos ready for your beautifully crafted Squarespace site! If you are doing the site yourself or sending these photos off to a designer, this can help your site process go a lot smoother. If you have any other tips to add in let me know in the comments below. Also, stay tuned for the next couple of weeks when I break down the other portions of my freebie for you.