Choosing the right images for your website is the difference between having a beautiful website and one that looks homemade. But there are a lot of things you need to take into consideration when selecting images for your website.
1. Get professional photography
So few people bother to get a professional photo shoot for your business yet it's so important. Professional photos will probably only cost you a few hundreds dollars or less and then they're something you can use in both your print and web advertising, so they're well worth it. You can find a professional photographer in your area by doing a simple Google search.
2. Optimizing images for web speed.
Everyone wants a fast loading web page but large file sizes from images are the number one cause of slowness. When you upload images to WebStarts they're automatically optimized for the web so the file sizes will shrink but don't ignore the original file size. If your file was huge, something like 2mb or more WebStarts is only going to be able to compress that so much. Try resizing your image and compressing it with a service like TinyPNG before uploading it to WebStarts.
3. Make sure you get the colors right.
If you're putting text over photos and images on your website make sure you darken or lighten the image so your tet is easily readable. You can do this by selecting an image in WebStarts and then selecting a background color like black, then use the transparency tool to increase or decrease the amount of the background color you want to show through. If you slap some white text over an image with a light background it's going to be hard to read.
4. Choose images that reflect what your website is about.
This may seem obvious but you'd be surprised how many people don't get it right. People are going to go to your site, glance it, and determine whether they came to the right place. Your images should reflect your products, services, or the type information that can be found on your site. Otherwise you're going to get a lot of people clicking the back button.