Sounds easy? It's not really. The role of images on your website is to tell instantly the main things about your business: what do you offer and for who.
Option 1. Ideally, you can hire a good photographer if you have time and money for that. Show your visitors what do your employees look like, your office or the interior in your store. This will help to "break the ice" of mistrust and will put your client closer to you. This is especially relevant for small companies.
Option 2 (terrible, but some peoples's choice). Download from Google search results. You should never do that. These pictures usually have copyright. They belong to someone and using them can lead to a lot of legal troubles.
Option 3. An alternative is to buy photos from stocks. It saves time, and does not cost much if you choose wisely. They have millions of files in their libraries, effective search algorithms with many filters. Usually, to download an image, you need to buy a subscription for a month, but there are options available with a price for an image of $1.
When buying files in photo stocks, you should not worry about copyright problems - all the images there are sold for standard license, which gives you the right to use them for media, printing and advertising purposes.
Our favorite photo stocks at Effective Marketing & Design are Shutterstock and iStockPhoto. If your website is build on Wix, you can take advantage of special prices for Shutterstock and pay as low as $2.99 for big variety of images.
There are free photo stocks. Sounds too good to be true? The choice will be much more limited, and prepare to spend more time searching for the desired image. Before using the file, make sure that the stock that offers free files does not infringe copyrights. Check out Pexels or Pikwizard.
Now, few simple but important rules how to choose the right photos for your site.
Avoid overly staged photos like the one below. Stock photography has a lot of stereotyped images. Surely you've seen such images as a laughing woman with a salad, businessmen shaking hands, a happy family at a festive table and embracing lovers.
Make sure that all images are in the same style. As in fashion - when you do not wear a tie to a sports suit. Pay attention to the color of your photos and their quality of pictures. Everything should be combined and create a whole picture.
Be inspired by examples of others. There is nothing wrong with being guided by leaders in your industry and inheriting those who run business online qualitatively and beautifully. It is not necessary to borrow everything entirely - it is enough to take as a basis their main idea of the illustrations and build your own based on that.
Follow current trends. There are trends in photography and design that change every year.