Choosing the Right Photos for Your Utility Website
What look do you want your utility website to portray? This can be professional and modern, or welcoming and friendly. This can be achieved through the use of colors, fonts, background textures, and, of course, photos! No matter what look and feel you’re going for, choose photos that really represent your community. It will give a humanized web experience for your site visitor.
Subject Matter
Your best asset are your employees! Including pictures of them doing their daily tasks is a great way to showcase your utility to your members and make them feel a sense of connection.
Take some photos of your member services team speaking with people in the lobby or answering phone calls. You can have your linemen working on power poles or in their bucket trucks.
Showcase your surrounding area! Depending on where you live, this can include the different crops from your area and farmland, or mountains and rivers. If you have wildlife, you can include those as well. Any features or landmarks that are special to your area will also help to make your site feel instantly recognizable.
Don’t forget to include your community! If your utility participates in a Youth Tour, use these photos to capture the spirit and fun that the kids have and put it on a webpage about the program. If you give safety demonstrations, get some pictures of your linemen presenting to the crowd.
Plan Out the Photos
You don’t need to hire a professional photographer to get these photos, but a little bit of planning will help. Make a list of certain pictures you’d like to get and what team members you’d like in them. This way you can give them a heads up to plan for it. While the photos may be somewhat staged, take several photos to try and get a good candid shot.
Candid photos of your employees working are great, but you can also get some nice group shots of them together as well. This can be a group photo of your linemen by bucket trucks, or, if possible, of your entire team standing outside together in front of your building.
Just make sure all your employees are ok with having their photo taken!
Placement & Layout
You can use these photos in a variety of ways on your site. You can incorporate them onto the pages themselves, such as on a Start New Service page, which can show linemen working on power poles. Just make sure the photos are relevant to the content that is on the page.
These can also be used as interior banner photos if using one of our blueprint designs. These will rotate on each interior page. As these have panoramic dimensions, you’ll want to make sure the photo will work with that layout. You don’t want to cut off anyone’s head! You can add as many interior banner photos as you like. You can even set a certain banner photo to a particular page.
Your prime real estate photo will be your homepage banner photo! Depending on what you are looking for, this can be one of the landscape photos of your area, or some of your employees working. Be aware of what else is included on your homepage banner section. If you have a Smart Hub or SEDC login box on the homepage, you’ll want to choose a photo where nothing will get covered by that login box. Choose a photo that has a focal point to one side to capture your site visitor’s attention.
Conclusion
Your use of photos can really shape the look and feel of your utility site. Take photos often to keep the site feeling new and fresh.
