Getting People Into Your Photos

What the customer is deciding

Whether the work will be good, and whether they want this person in their house for three days.

Photographs of finished work answer the first question well. Almost nothing on a typical trade website answers the second one at all.

A face does. It is not rational in the sense of being evidence of anything, and it is how people actually decide, particularly for work inside their own home.

The businesses that show their people are answering a question that the ones who do not have simply left open.

Why trades avoid it

Worth acknowledging, because the reluctance is genuine rather than laziness.

Most people dislike being photographed. It feels self-promoting in a way that a photograph of a wall does not. And a posed portrait feels false to somebody whose work is practical.

All of that is reasonable, and it points at the answer: not a portrait, but a photograph of somebody working.

Being photographed doing your job is considerably easier than being photographed as yourself, and the result is more useful.

The photographs worth having

• Working, concentrating on the task rather than looking at the camera.
• Hands doing something skilled, which needs no face at all.
• With the van, which is what arrives at somebody's house.
• Talking to a customer, with permission, which shows manner.
• A plain head and shoulders for the about page.
• The team together, if there is one.

The second is the compromise for anybody who refuses to be in a photograph. Hands working convey craft, care and the presence of a human being without anybody being identifiable.

A worked example

A two-person decorating business whose website had eleven photographs of finished rooms and no people.

They added four: one of each of them working, one of the pair with the van, and a plain photograph on the about page.

Taken on a phone, in work clothes, mid-job. Nothing was staged and nobody was posed.

Over the following months several customers mentioned the photographs during quotes, usually along the lines of having a sense of who would be turning up.

The proportion of enquiries that became jobs rose. Nothing else on the site changed and the work was the same work.

Their conclusion was that the photographs had removed a hesitation they never knew existed, because nobody ever tells you why they chose somebody else.

Taking them without a photographer

Practical, since hiring somebody is rarely the first step.

Have somebody else take them, which is easier than any arrangement involving a timer.

Work naturally rather than posing. The photographs that read as genuine are the ones where somebody is looking at what they are doing rather than at the lens.

Take far more than you think you need, because most will be unflattering in some way nobody could have predicted at the time.

Daylight, as always, and a background that is not a mess, which for a working environment means moving two things before you start.

And accept that everybody dislikes photographs of themselves. The ones you dislike least are usually the ones that read best to a stranger who has never met you.

The counter-case

Where showing people is not right.

Anybody with a genuine safety or privacy reason for not appearing online, which is a decision to respect without discussion.

Businesses where the staff turn over frequently, and a site featuring three people who have left is worse than one featuring nobody.

Work where the customer never meets anybody, such as a purely remote service, where the trust question is different.

In each of those, the alternative is the other trust signals used harder: the licence numbers, the years, the memberships, and hands-at-work photographs that show people without identifying them.

Staff photographs and their problems

A practical difficulty worth planning around.

A page of individual staff portraits becomes out of date the moment somebody leaves, and updating it requires a new photograph in the same style.

Which is why those pages are so often stale, featuring people who left two years ago.

The arrangements that age better: the owner plus a line saying how many people work there, or a group photograph rather than individuals, or photographs of work with people in them rather than a formal roster.

Whatever you choose, decide who updates it and when, or it will not be updated.

What to wear

A small thing that decides whether a photograph reads as genuine.

Work clothes, clean, as you would actually turn up. Not a suit, and not the state of things at four on a Friday.

Branded workwear helps if you have it, because it connects the person in the photograph to the van and the site.

What to avoid is looking staged: a spotless outfit in a workshop reads as a stock photograph, which is exactly the impression these images exist to counter.

The aim is recognisable rather than polished. Somebody should be able to look at the picture and then at the person who arrives, and see the same person.

Permission from everybody involved

Both your own people and anybody else in frame.

An employee should be asked rather than told, and should be able to decline without it being awkward. Somebody who is uncomfortable in photographs will look uncomfortable in the photograph.

A customer appearing in a picture needs to agree specifically, and that agreement should be recorded rather than remembered.

And think about what happens when somebody leaves. An employee's photograph on your site after they have gone is something they may reasonably ask you to remove.

How often to redo them

Less often than you would think and more often than most businesses manage.

Photographs of people date faster than photographs of work, because clothes, vans and haircuts place an image in time.

Every two or three years is reasonable for a stable business, and immediately when somebody joins or leaves.

What actually happens is that photographs taken during a website build in 2014 are still there in 2020, showing somebody noticeably younger, alongside a van in the old livery.

That is not a disaster and it does undermine the point, since the reason for having them was to show the customer who will turn up.

Adding it to whatever annual review covers the rest of the site is enough.

Where they go

1. The about page, which is where people check.
2. The homepage, one image rather than a gallery.
3. Service pages, where somebody is doing that service.
4. Your listing, where photographs of people are unusual and stand out.
5. Quotes and proposals, where a face makes a document less anonymous.

The fourth is worth trying deliberately. Most listings in any trade show photographs of finished work, and a picture of the person who will actually turn up is genuinely differentiating.

What the about page around it should say is covered in the about page nobody reads and why it matters.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.