Important: Please don’t download anything from Google Images, Facebook or other people’s websites, it’s illegal and could end up costing you £1000’s in court costs.
You can get high quality images for free by signing up for a free trial with a stock photo site. Just Google… “stock photos free trial” but don’t forget to cancel your membership before the first payment is due, usually after 7 days.
You can also find lots of free images on websites such as Pixabay or Pexels.
In my experience, images are one of the biggest cause of delays in building websites so, if you’re providing your own then please think carefully and spend plenty of time choosing the right ones.
Before downloading any images please think about the layout and accent colours you’ve chosen and try to find images that compliment your vision.
If you want a clean, modern, minimal looking website then filling every page with multi coloured, garish photos of nothing will completely ruin the design.
Banners and background images: If you want a full width image banner on your home page or something similar on your internal pages then you need to make sure the images you choose can be cropped to fit. If all you want is a background colour, gradient or pattern (which all look great!) then it’s not an issue but if you have a theme in mind and want to use photos then it gets tricky.
Square peg, round hole! If you were to download a tall, portrait style photo or a photo where the focus object fills the space then it’s going to be very difficult to crop it to fit your banner area.
See below…
If you want to place a photo of yourself on a banner to use as a page heading or a section background then either take a wide shot in front of a background that will look good on your website or we can use the cut & paste method of cropping you out of a photo and placing your image on to a different background. To do this you’ll need to ensure that your whole outline is included. If a section of your head or body is cropped off then it’ll look terrible on your banner.
Let’s take a look…
Let’s try that again shall we….
This post will be updated regularly with more tips and tricks to help you create your perfect website images.