I recently had a long, educational consultation with a potential industrial machinery client about website photo galleries for industrial companies. We discussed a number of things related to photos he had taken over the years that he would like to use on a new website.
AUTHENTICITY
The first thing we discussed was authenticity. Industrial buyers prefer authenticity and they can easily spot purchased, stock photos. Buyers want to see what you have actually done... not generic, staged marketing photos. Purchased stock photos reduce your credibility with industrial buyers. Why? Most folks in the industrial world have seen the nearly identical stock photos of welders with sparks flying. Web designers who don't understand your company and who don't understand the industrial B2B world, seem to use those welding pictures frequently because apparently sparks are pretty and attention getting. And they think that is exactly what all industry is. So when a company like yours uses those inauthentic, run of the mill stock photos, it can send a message that maybe you don't care enough to show what you actually do. It can send a message that perhaps you're too lazy to do it right or perhaps that you just don't care about details. But in a world where tolerances are measured in millimeters, it is extremely important to use authentic photos of your actual work!
PHOTOS AND NON-DISCLOSURE AGREEMENTS
The issue of confidentiality between small manufacturers and their buyers comes up frequently in my discussions with my own website clients. Quite simply, a lot of OEMs and other buyers simply don't want pictures, or any content, about their projects being featured on a suppliers website pages. Using photos or videos of their proprietary parts, components, equipment or machinery could be in violation of the buyer's NDA agreement that you signed. Quite simply, it is just not worth it for you to risk losing a profitable client because you got sloppy in releasing photos with proprietary content for use on your website. To help guard against this, our website contract at Baer Web Design requires your affirmation that any content that you provide to us for use on your website, does not violate the proprietary rights of any other party. So please be careful when turning over photos to your web design team. You need to review them first!
PHOTO QUANTITIES
We also chatted about using only 20-30 photos (max) per gallery instead of hundreds of photos. Website visitors generally won't click more than that. The last thing you want to do is annoy your website visitors. So showing them 10-15 photos demonstrating your capabilities is helpful to your sales effort. But inundating a potential buyer by expecting them to click through hundreds of photos is almost disrespecting their time and their interest in your company. So even if you have thousands of photos, you need to narrow those down significantly. You need to choose the best photos, categorize them, and write captions for each photo to help potential buyers understand what each photo is and to help with SEO.
SIZE MATTERS... FOR THE IMAGES ON YOUR WEBSITE
It is critical that photos are dimensionally sized down, that they are cropped as needed to focus on the best part of each image, and that photo file sizes are reduced to under 100 kb each. And photo qualities such as brightness and contrast might also need adjusting. Few things will ruin a user experience more than slow loading pictures and slow loading website pages. Large photos, in fact, are the #1 problem that bogs down web page speed, which will hurt your SEO significantly. And few things will disappoint a site visitor more than eagerly opening a photo album only to have poor quality pictures. So you website designer should be willing to review all photos for your project and to improve them as needed.
These are some of the most important considerations for industrial companies that want to include large numbers of photos on their websites. So keep taking lots of photos of your work, and then let Baer Web Design properly do your photos and image galleries for your company's industrial website design.