You might think this is going to be your basic boring, button-down blog post, but in a very key sense, you’d be wrong.
Not having the right photos in the right format is more than just an annoyance for a company. It can be a truly nerve-racking dilemma.
First, let’s paint this picture:
The management wants to have a great website.
They invest money in hiring outsourced marketers to put together all of those neat web pages that will represent thought leadership and grow their business through web marketing. But they balk at the cost of Getty images, so instead, they ask the marketing managers to figure out sourcing themselves.
The marketing managers don’t want to pay, either, so they hire freelancers and make them scrub the web for Wikimedia Commons pictures, and collect licensing and authorship information to try to decrease legal liability.
If you have any essential handle on how intellectual content stuff works, you can already see where this is going. It’s a debacle – it’s DOA. It’s never going to end up working well. In most cases, someone doesn’t like the quality of the free images, but doesn’t want to pay for stock photos, and the scapegoating keeps going on round and round the Maypole. The best practice is to avoid all of this and make good managerial decisions about paying for visuals on the web.
Images and Formatting
Here’s another place where companies tragically go wrong. They may have great photos in hand already from staff photographers. Maybe they have high-quality pictures taken on a job site of employees working stoically to complete company projects. There’s only one problem – those pictures are all in a traditional JPEG or TIF or some other format that’s nearly completely unusable in modern graphic design. For most higher-quality print or web projects, graphic designers will want the images to be in a vector format. The traditional raster formats don’t lend themselves to accessibility through Adobe programs or even some kinds of website integration.
The Easy Solution
Listen, if your management doesn’t want to wrangle with issues around image management, you’re not alone. It’s as easy as calling WebSubstance and letting us take care of the whole puzzle for you. We have our own photography services, and a highly evolved outlook on how to do images. You won’t have to worry about how much Getty Images charges per picture or whether freelancers will balk at being the guinea pigs for some corner-cutting, labor-intensive image policy. You’ll be ahead of many of your competitors, too, because sadly, these kinds of problems crop up in the industry all the time. On the other hand, at WebSubstance, we have no problem putting the right policies in place to optimize your web presence the right way. Call us for the all of the help that you need to modernize your web site and take your business to the next level in today’s digital business world.
