Photos For Your Website
Your photos do more work on your site than almost anything else. Real photos of your real work beat anything we could buy from a stock library, and customers can tell the difference immediately. Here's what to send and how to get good ones without any special equipment.
Aim for 15 to 30.
More is better than fewer. We'd rather choose from too many than build around too few, and we'll pick the strongest ones. Phone photos are completely fine.
WHAT TO SEND
The shot list
Your work, finished. The jobs you're proud of. One service per photo rather than trying to show everything at once, and include a person working where you can — it reads as real rather than staged.
Before and afters. The single most persuasive thing on a service business website. More on these below.
You. One clear photo of just you. This is the one we'd push you hardest on. Customers want to see who they'll be dealing with, and a photo of the owner does more for trust than anything else on the page. It doesn't need to be a professional headshot.
Your team. A separate shot of everyone together if you have a crew. It signals you're a real operation with people, which is a different message from the one your solo photo sends.
Your trucks, tools, and uniforms. Especially important if you don't have a storefront. Branded vehicles and equipment prove you're an established business rather than someone working out of a car.
Your shop or office. If you have one, show it. It gives people a sense of what working with you is actually like.
TAKING THE PHOTOS
Getting good ones
Daylight beats a flash. Shoot outside or near a window wherever possible. Overhead lights and camera flashes flatten everything and make good work look worse than it is.
Clean the frame first. Move the tools, the coffee cup, the ladder that isn't part of the job. A messy background is the fastest way to make skilled work look sloppy.
Leave room around the subject. Don't fill the frame edge to edge. Keeping the subject to roughly a third of the frame gives us space to crop it for different parts of the site and to lay text over it. Photos shot tight are often unusable in a hero section.
Take more than you think. Several angles, a few distances. It costs you nothing on a phone, and having options means we can build the page around the best shot rather than the only shot.
Turn on your grid lines. Most phone cameras have them in the camera settings. They make it much easier to keep things level and centred.
Hold still and check it. A blurry photo can't be fixed later. Glance at it before you move on.
THE BIG ONE
Before and afters
These are worth more than every other photo combined. A review tells someone you do good work. A before and after shows them, and lets them picture their own house in the before shot. If you send us nothing else, send these.
Take the before first. This is the shot everyone forgets. You're focused on starting the job, and by the time you remember, the job's half done. Set a reminder on your phone if you need to.
Same angle, same distance. Stand in the same spot for both. The consistency is what makes the comparison obvious — if the framing changes, people can't tell what actually changed.
Make the change obvious. Someone should see what's different in about a second, without reading a caption.
A note on customers' homes.
Exterior shots taken from the street are generally fine. For photos inside someone's home, it's worth asking first — most people say yes, and it saves an awkward conversation later.
SENDING THEM
Uploading your photos
Use the link below. You don't need a Dropbox account, and you can't see anything else in the folder — it only accepts uploads. Open it, add your files, and hit upload.
If your photos are on your phone, open this page on your phone and pick them straight off your camera roll. It's usually faster than moving them to a computer first.
Short on photos?
Send what you have and tell us. We can build with a smaller set and swap in better ones as you take them. Stock photos are a last resort, not a starting point, so we'd rather work with six real ones than thirty we bought.
Not sure whether a photo is worth sending? Send it. We'll tell you.
