Your website is a communication tool. How you design your website will determine how and what you communicate to your website visitors. The obvious way of communicating is using words. Writing all the information that your website visitor will need to understand who you are and what you do.
A less obvious way of communicating is using images. You will obviously need writing as well, but having a website designed that is very image-led can be much more effective than having a website that is designed to accommodate more copy. Here are some things to consider if you want to have an image-led website design:
Capture your audience\’s attention
Website visitors have a notoriously short attention span. A strong image can communicate far more to a casual visitor than writing will and you can use a strong image to capture the attention of casual visitors so that they continue to look through your website. Reading takes much more effort than glancing at an image, so choose a strong, communicative image for your landing page to capture the attention of your audience.
What does the image say
Think about the 4 Ps when you are choosing your image. You want an image that communicates what your product is, where it is placed in the market and what the price is. A casual glance should be able to tell a website visitor whether your brand is luxury or commodity, what your brand offers in terms of good or services and how expensive your goods or services are. How your image is styled and what is included in the image should give website visitors a real sense of your brand USPs.
Encourage website visitors to read on
Many image-led and design-led websites can be hard to navigate, as practicalities take second place to the practicalities. However, if you are going to have a stand-out website design, then ensure that your visitors can still navigate easily to the information that the need to become customers. Your strong images on your website should be there to entice visitors to read on, not to become a distraction.
SEO
Images aren\’t great for search engine optimisation, your alt tags will only get you so far. If you are having an image-led website design, with minimal copy, then attach a blog to your website so that you can provide extra information for your website visitors and provide more opportunities for fitting your keywords in.