Improve Your School Website Imagery with These Tips
If a picture is worth a thousand words, demonstrate this on your website, where good-quality visuals are essential to showcase your message. On a school website, pictures can be used to bring the information on your school to life, helping promote it in the local community.
Check Your Camera
The good-quality pictures you want for your school website need a good-quality camera. Ideally you want one with at least ten megapixels. While iPads and tablets tend to have lower-quality cameras that result in images that are fuzzy and unprofessional, you do not need the school to spend lots of money on a fancy camera. Most Apple and Android phones can take pictures of sufficient quality.
Use Landscape Pictures
You will want pictures that showcase your school across a variety of settings, including outdoor areas, science labs, halls and classrooms that show the different activities that take place in your school, including extracurricular sport and performing arts.
However, make sure the pictures you use in websites for schools are in landscape mode rather than portrait to fit better on the website. This is particularly true of those images used for background and sliders, where portrait mode can often result in blurriness and unnatural cropping such as chopped-off heads. The image width should be at least 1200 pixels wide.
If this sounds very confusing and complicated, do not worry. Your web designer should be able to make suggestions on what images will be suitable. When choosing a designer, look for one who has some expertise in designing websites for schools to get the most professional results.
Choosing Images
The more variety in your images, the more vibrant your school will appear, so showcase all areas of your school from classroom lessons to sporting triumphs to the school show. Avoid having too many posed pictures on the site, as most people will prefer more spontaneous shots, and get parental permission for any images that show students. You can also use stock photos of the appropriate quality to help convey your message.