Your photos are telling customers what to pay you

Put five of your website photos side by side and look at them for ten seconds. One is a phone snap taken in bad light. One is a stock photo of a handshake. One was taken by a friend with a good camera, three years and one haircut ago. One is a bit too blue and one is a bit too orange.

Nobody who visits your site does this on purpose. Every one of them does it without thinking, and they reach a verdict before they have read a word.

Photos are the loudest thing on the page

People look at pictures before they read. That's why photos do more of the work of deciding whether you look like a safe pair of hands than anything you write.

When the photos agree with each other, the business looks organised, because it probably is. When they do not, the business looks like it was put together in a hurry by several different people, because it probably was. The visitor does not consciously think "the colour temperature is inconsistent". They think "hmm", and they go and get another quote.

What "consistent" actually means

It does not mean expensive, and it does not always mean a photoshoot. It means a handful of rules that every photo on your site, your socials and your proposals has to follow.

• One light. All warm or all cool, all bright or all moody. Pick one and stick to it.
• One level of colour. Find your least saturated photo and bring the rest down to match it. One vivid picture in a calm set jumps out, and not in a good way.
• Same framing for people. If you show your team, their faces should be about the same size in the frame, looking roughly at the camera and cropped the same way. A row of headshots where one person is a tiny figure in a garden and another fills the whole circle looks careless.
• Plain clothes, plain backgrounds. Busy patterns and bright shirts turn into noise at small sizes. Clean backgrounds, or none at all, keep attention on the person.
• Colours that belong to you. If your brand is deep green and copper, a bright red van in the hero image is fighting you. Sometimes the fix is a better photo. Sometimes it is a subtle colour adjustment so the image sits inside your palette.
• Real over stock. One honest photo of your actual workshop beats ten glossy pictures of people you have never met. Customers can tell.

The florist who looked like every other florist

When Phyllis Rooney came to us, PJ's Petals already had a perfectly nice website. It had a soft palette and a moody photograph of roses. The trouble was that it looked exactly like every other florist in the country. There was nothing wrong with the photography. It just said nothing about her.

That is the part people miss. Consistent photography is not only about looking tidy. It is about looking like you, every time, so that the fifth time someone sees your work they know it is yours before they see the name.

Do you need a photographer?

Sometimes. Often not straight away. A lot can be done with what you already have: choosing the right twenty photos out of two hundred, matching their colour and exposure, cropping them to a consistent shape, and quietly retiring the ones that let the side down. When you do book a photographer, a written photography direction means you get pictures you can actually use, not a folder of nice shots in five different styles.

That is why photography direction is in our brand identity work from the £3,500 level up. A logo tells people your name. Your photos tell them what to expect, and what to pay.

Worth saying plainly: none of this makes a poor business look like a good one for long. It makes a good business look like one straight away. Your logo was never the whole brand anyway.

If you are not sure whether your photos are helping or hurting, book a 30-minute call. No pitch, no pressure. We will look at what your current images are saying about you and tell you honestly which ones to keep.