Process
Website Photos: What to Shoot, What to Skip, and What Never to Use
By the Coast Creative team5 min read
Most websites that feel generic don't have a design problem. They have a photo problem.
You can spend weeks on layout and copy and still end up with something forgettable, because every image came from a stock library. Photos are the fastest signal a visitor reads. Before anyone gets to your headline, they have already decided whether you look like a real business in a real place.
Start with your face, not your building
The single highest-value photo on most small business sites is a good picture of the person the customer will deal with. Not a corporate portrait against a gray backdrop. You, outdoors or near a window, in the clothes you actually wear to work, looking at the camera.
Get three versions in one session: one vertical for the about page, one horizontal with space beside you for text, and one tight crop for directories and email. Same shirt, same day, same light.
If you have a team, shoot everyone the same way on the same day. Mixed headshots — a studio portrait, a cropped wedding photo, a phone selfie — read as disorganized even when no one can say why.
The shot list most businesses forget
After the people photos, the shots that do the most work are the ordinary ones:
Work in progress. Not the finished result — the middle of the job. A crew framing a wall, a stylist mid-cut, a table being plated. These prove the work is yours in a way a finished shot never can.
Before and after pairs. Shoot them from the same spot at the same height. A before from the doorway and an after from across the room is useless as a pair, and people notice.
Your space. The front door, the entry, the parking. People headed to a first appointment want to know what they're looking for.
Details. Tools, materials, texture. These fill the small slots where a full scene would look cramped.
Real customers, with permission in writing. A photo of an actual client next to their testimonial is worth more than the quote alone.
Stock photos: fine in the background, fatal in the foreground
Stock is acceptable for abstract supporting imagery — a texture, a wide landscape, a neutral backdrop behind a section of text. It is not acceptable anywhere a visitor would reasonably assume they're looking at you, your team, your work, or your customers.
The classic failure is the smiling stranger in a hard hat on a contractor's homepage. Visitors have seen that person on forty other sites, and the moment one photo looks fake they discount everything else on the page, testimonials included.
If you don't have a real photo for a slot yet, don't fill it with a fake one. Use the space for a strong pull quote, a list, or a map instead. An honest gap beats a staged one.
Your phone is fine. Bad light isn't.
Modern phone cameras are more than good enough for a website. Almost every bad photo I get from clients failed on light, not on gear.
Three rules cover most of it. Put the light in front of the subject, not behind — a window behind someone turns them into a silhouette. Skip midday sun outdoors; early morning and the hour before sunset are kinder. Indoors, turn the lights on and then get closer to a window anyway.
Take more than you think you need. Ten versions of one shot costs nothing and gives your designer room to pick what fits.
Size the files before you upload them
A photo straight off a phone or a DSLR can be eight megabytes. Put twenty of those on a page and the site crawls, especially on the phone where most of your visitors are.
Resize the long edge to about 2,400 pixels and save as a high-quality JPEG, or WebP if your tools support it. Most images should land under 300KB. If one image on your site is over a megabyte, it's costing you visitors.
Name the files while you're at it. "kitchen-remodel-pasadena.jpg" tells Google something. "IMG_4471.jpg" tells it nothing.
Know what you're allowed to use
Photos you didn't take aren't automatically yours to publish. Two situations catch people constantly: work from a hired photographer, where the license may cover print but not web, and real estate listing photos, which belong to the listing brokerage and generally can't be reused after the sale.
Ask for written permission that names web use. It's a two-line email and it prevents a takedown notice later.
What to hand your designer
Originals, not screenshots. Full resolution, one folder, roughly grouped — people, work, space, details — with a note on anything that has usage restrictions.
At Coast Creative we write the shot list before design starts, so the layout gets built around photos that exist rather than photos someone hopes to take later. It's the simplest way to keep a project from stalling a week before launch waiting on images.
Good photos won't save a bad website. But on a well-built one, they're the difference between looking like a business and looking like a template.