Website Photography

The benefit of good photos on your holiday accommodation website

Now that everyone’s photo is a megapixel digital camera and everyone’s devices are bursting with thousands of images which all deserve to hang in a national gallery, when it comes to adding photos to a website most people’s first instinct is to go down the DIY route. Whilst this may work for some, for many the images used do not properly reflect their business, product or service in the best possible light.

As a website designer is Cumbria I often get asked to take on people’s existing sites. Working especially in the holiday accommodation market many sites were designed up to 10 years ago after the foot and mouth epidemic after which as part of the recovery process government grants were handed out for amongst other things building websites. This was good for the web developers and at the time the businesses themselves, but after 10 years the sites have begun to look dated.

At the time most internet users were connected via dial up modems and so speed and size were of the essence – which meant photos were often very small and indistinct. Whilst the growth of mobile usage for internet surfing means that speed is once more becoming an issue, so too is the use of tablets like the eponymous Ipad, where graphics and photos are almost as important as the words used.

As a result now when I take on a new project one of the first recommendations I make is to make sure that there are a good range of high quality high resolution photos available. If not then I will recommend a company like Beyond Imagination Photography, who specialise in taking professional website and marketing photos across Cumbria. The difference this can make is truly stunning. With a decent set of photos at your disposal, and a little creativity and imagination, it is relatively easy to create great looking websites that truly showcase your business.

Glenridding Cottages

Take the example of our own holiday cottages in Glenridding. As with most other people, I like to think  can take a pretty good photo. Here is the one I used to market my cottage for years, taken by myself back in 2005.

It’s not a bad photo – lovely blue skies and good views of the fell in the background. Now here’s the one I recently had taken by Beyond Imagination Photography:

Enough said!

The Golden Rules for Holiday Cottage Website Photos

Some basic rules to remember with great website and marketing photos:

• Don’t forget the big picture. Don’t forget to take range of close up and wide angle shots. Nothing is more annoying to a potential guest than seeing nothing more than some close up shots on candles and fluffy towels on a holiday cottage website, with no sense of the outside of the property, the size of the rooms, or the local area
• Ambience is everything. Make sure you add some atmosphere. Whilst it can be off-putting to see photos of you sprawling on the sofa watching the telly, if you have an open fire or woodburner then a photo of it alit and roaring will look great. Likewise the garden table with the great view will look even better in the photo with a bottle of wine and a couple of glasses. Just remember to not go overboard on the “cheese” factor
• Size matters. When you’re adding the photos to you website make sure you resize them properly. Despite the point above on connection speeds, it’s still important to have all your site pages as optimised as possible. Resizing the photo on the page wont’ help much – if it used to be a 3MB file it still will be until you resize it and save it in a smaller format.
• Apple Flash – don’t forget that if you’re tempted by wizzy flash photo galleries they’ll look great everywhere except on any apple device – which means these days a fair proportion of people will see nothing but a large white space! Not ideal…

So that’s about it. Hopefully this blog has done nothing other than state the exceedingly obvious – but it never hurts to say it again! If you’d like to see more examples of Beyond Imagination photos please visit their website for professional photography in Cumbria. If you’d like more information on our website design or SEO Services, please click the links.