The year was 1993 and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) released a new web browser called Mosaic. This wasn’t exactly front-page news to many, but in certain geeky circles it was a watershed moment.
The breakthrough of Mosaic was its ability to display images embedded on pages (rather than in a separate window) - paving the way for the web to metamorphasise from a black-and-white, Times New Roman world into the colourful, visually-rich medium it is today.
Fast-forward 15 years—through the rise of e-commerce, dot-com boom and bust, the blogoshpere, web 2.0 and the social-web—and good imagery is one of the most important aspects of success on the web.
If you are on the web to do business high-quality, relevant photography goes a long way to promote your products or services to potential customers. Along with killer content it can persuade and influence, turning visitors into buyers.
However, one of the trickiest (and often most time consuming) decisions marketers have to make when producing a new publication, whether it be print or web based, is the sourcing and selecting of photographic material. Of course, this becomes even more problematic when it’s a specific ‘niche’ that you’re promoting.
Not that winter tourism can be described as ‘niche’, but the particular image your business is looking to portray within this industry may be just that.
Finding appropriate shots is the first and, in most cases, the hardest step. There’s just so many considerations; quality, file size, colour scheme, cost, legalities of use, the list goes on.
Many of our readers will have come across at least one of these problems before. So we’ve decided it time the Tactical Thinking team bring you a series on how to source, select and utilise photographic images. To kick it off, this first post discusses the different methods of sourcing photographs and the pros and cons of each. (more…)
