Photography: the best money in your website budget

Ask me where to spend an extra few hundred dollars on a new website and the answer is nearly always the same: not on the website. On photographs.

A good photographer for half a day does more for how many people call you than most features I could build. Here is why, what to photograph, what a photographer costs, and the one question about the pictures almost nobody asks until it is too late.

• People look hard at real photos and ignore decorative ones. Your own work, your own team and your own premises get read. Stock gets skipped.
• On most pages the first big thing that loads is a picture. Handled badly, it is also what makes the page slow.
• Google asks that Business Profile photos "represent reality". The same pictures do the work in both places.
• A commercial photographer typically charges $125 to $370 an hour in the US. Half a day covers most small businesses for years.
• Unless you agree otherwise in writing, the photographer owns the pictures. Get the licence written down before the shoot.

The Nielsen Norman Group has been tracking where people's eyes go on web pages for years. Its finding on photographs is blunt. Users

pay close attention to photos and other images that contain relevant information but ignore fluffy pictures used to "jazz up" web pages.

In its studies, people spent more time looking at real staff portraits than reading the biographies next to them, even though the text took up far more space. Stock photos of generic models on the same kinds of pages got no attention at all. Product photos that showed what made one product different from another were studied closely. Photos that could have been any product were not.

For a local business, that sorts your pictures into two piles:

• Pictures that carry information: the finished job, the before and after, the dish, the room, the people who will actually turn up. These get looked at, and they persuade.
• Pictures that fill space: the handshake, the smiling headset, the laptop on a desk. These get skipped — or worse, they tell the visitor that you had nothing real to show.

Your Google Business Profile — the panel on the map — takes photos too, and Google's guidance for them reads like a photographer's brief. They should be "in focus and well lit, and have no significant alterations or excessive use of filters", and

the image should represent reality.

So a shoot is not just for the website. The same set goes on your profile, your social accounts, your printed menu and your van. If your profile is not set up yet, this guide walks through it.

A shot list, not "some nice pictures". Before any shoot I send one, built around the holes in the actual design. For most local businesses it covers:

1. The outside, from where a customer would approach, so they recognise it when they arrive.
2. The work itself. Finished jobs, the plate, the haircut, the garden. If the change is the product, a before and after.
3. Hands doing the work. Close, in the middle of the job. This is the photo that says "a real person does this".
4. The people — you, and anyone a customer will meet — looking like you do on a normal day, not in a suit you never wear.
5. The inside, tidied, lights on, with a customer's eye view of the room.
6. Details. Tools, materials, the sign, the thing regulars recognise.

Horizontal and vertical versions of the most important ones, because the same picture has to fill a wide screen and a phone.

There is a catch. HTTP Archive, which measures millions of websites every year, found that on 85.3% of desktop pages and 76% of mobile pages the largest thing to appear as the page loads is an image. That is the moment a visitor decides whether the page is slow.

So a photographer's full-size files cannot go straight onto a site. Each one needs to be sent at the size the visitor's screen actually needs, in a modern format, with the first picture loaded straight away and the rest only as the visitor scrolls to them. Done properly, you can have plenty of good photos and a fast page. Done badly, the best pictures you own are the reason people leave.

Thumbtack's price guide, which is built from quotes on its own marketplace, puts commercial photography at $125 to $370 an hour in the US, averaging $198, or $299 to $645 for a flat-rate shoot. The price moves with travel, the number of edited pictures, and — the part people skip — the licence.

For a small business the usual shape is half a day on your premises, with the shot list agreed beforehand, delivering somewhere between thirty and eighty edited pictures. Spread over the years you will use them, it is one of the cheapest things in the whole budget.

Three things make a shoot go well:

• Send the shot list ahead, so the photographer arrives knowing what the pictures are for.
• Pick the time of day for the light, not for convenience. A room lit by a window at ten in the morning looks nothing like the same room at four.
• Tidy for the camera, not for yourself. Clear surfaces, hide the cables, and have the work you want shown actually in progress.

This is the question that catches people out years later, when they want the photos on a billboard, or they change web designer, or the photographer sees their work in an advert they did not know about.

Under US copyright law the person who creates a work is its author. A photo you pay for only becomes yours automatically if it is a "work made for hire" — and for an independent photographer that needs a written agreement, signed by both of you, expressly saying so, and even then only for a narrow list of kinds of work that business photos usually do not fall into.

So by default, the photographer owns the copyright and you get a licence to use the pictures. That is normal and usually fine. What matters is what the licence says. Before the shoot, get it in writing:

• Where you can use them. Website, Google, social media, print, adverts. "Web only" licences exist and are cheaper.
• For how long. Ideally with no end date.
• Whether anyone working for you can use them — your web designer, your printer, a future agency — without asking again.
• Whether the photographer can use them too, in their own portfolio. Most will want to, and most businesses do not mind.

If you want to own the copyright outright, ask. Many photographers will assign it for a higher fee. Just do not assume it, because by default it is not yours.

That is fine, and it should not hold a site up. A modern phone with a good shot list gets you a long way, and a site can be designed to need almost no photographs at all. The three routes I use — your phone, carefully chosen stock, and design that does not rely on pictures — are set out in what I need before we start.

The one thing never to do is lift photos from somebody else's website or a Google image search. They belong to someone, and "I found it online" is not a licence.

• I send a shot list built around your design before any camera comes out, whether it is a photographer's or your phone.
• I tell you honestly when a project needs a photographer, because it often does, and I can recommend one and brief them.
• I pick, crop and edit from everything you send — including the ones you think are bad.
• Every photo on sites I build is served to each visitor at the right size in a modern format. Pictures further down the page load as the visitor gets to them, so the page stays fast however many good photos you have.
• Every picture gets a written description for people using screen readers.
• I tell you which pictures are stock, so you always know which parts of your site are literally true.