What to shoot
A recent phone in good daylight is enough for most of these. One professional shoot a year for the main photos is worth it if you can.
- The owner and team, at work, not lined up against a wall.
- The place: outside so people recognize it, inside so they know what to expect.
- The work: finished jobs, dishes, products, before and after.
- Customers, with their permission.
Sizing for the web
- Resize before uploading. A photo straight off a phone can be 4 to 10 MB; on a web page it rarely needs to be more than a few hundred KB.
- Use modern formats like WebP or AVIF where your site supports them.
- Serve smaller versions to phones. Good sites and builders do this automatically.
- Set the width and height, so the page doesn’t jump while images load.
Alt text
Every meaningful image needs a short description in its alt text: what it shows, written for someone who can’t see it. “Crew replacing a shingle roof in Conway” helps screen reader users and tells search engines what the photo is. Decorative images should have empty alt text so screen readers skip them.
Written by Nikita Huttenlocher, founder and lead engineer at Huttenlocher Technologies, a web design and software company in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.