▨Images in practice

Your own — by a clear margin.

The ranking by effect:

1. Your own photos of real work. Your workshop, your team, a finished site. Even taken with a phone.
2. Professional photos of you and your business.
3. Licensed images, used sparingly — as a stopgap.
4. No image at all.

Why stock images come fourth: a photo of smiling people at a conference table says “there is nothing of our own here”. Visitors recognise it immediately, even if they cannot put it into words.

The test: could this image be on your competitor’s site? If so, it achieves nothing.

With four moves that make up 90 percent:

1. Hold it landscape. Most places on a website are wider than they are tall. A portrait photo gets cropped — exactly where it was interesting.
2. Daylight. At the window, outdoors, not under the neon lights of the workshop.
3. Tidy up before you press the shutter. The coffee mug in the picture is what sticks in people’s minds.
4. Get closer. The most common mistake is too much surroundings around too little subject.

Plus two things that are often forgotten:

• Take several shots. Storage costs nothing; a second attempt later costs time.
• Look at it before uploading, at full size. On a phone display, many things look sharper than they are.

Three steps, two minutes per image altogether:

1. Crop. To the section that is needed — in the format in which it is shown. That saves you the block cropping it in an awkward place.
2. Check the size. At least 1600 pixels wide for images across the full page width, 800 for smaller ones. More does no harm — Aurora Hive Sites reduces the size for delivery.
3. Name it sensibly. “facade-apartment-building-dresden.jpg” instead of “IMG_4711.jpg”. Search engines read the file name.

What you do not need time for: compressing the image by hand. That happens automatically on delivery.

What you should not forget: the alt text when uploading. Nobody adds it later.

Because the block brings all images to the same shape and works outwards from the centre.

What helps:

• Crop beforehand, in the ratio that is needed. For a wide background image, around 16:9.
• The essential part in the middle. If the subject is at the edge, it gets cut off.
• Check on a mobile phone. Cropping there is often different from on a computer — usually even tighter.

The case that goes wrong most often: a group photo as a background image. The people at the edges are gone. Use an image that works in the middle for this, and show the group elsewhere.

If the crop matters to you, do it yourself. That is the only way to control it.

Fewer than you think — and the limit is not technical but a matter of reading.

As a guide:

• Home page: three to five images.
• Service page: one to three.
• Gallery: eight to twelve.

What argues against more:

• Loading time. Images make up almost the entire weight of a page.
• Attention. Someone who sees forty images sees none.
• Maintenance. Every image ages.

The tough exercise that pays off: take the best ten from a gallery of forty images. It hurts and makes the page better — because now every image shows something.

Describe what can be seen — factually, in one sentence.

Good: - “Freshly rendered facade of an apartment building in light grey” - “Two fitters installing a heat pump”

Not good: - “Image1”, “Photo”, “IMG_4711” - “Nice facade” — a judgement, not a description - “Facade painter Dresden painting work cheap” — keyword stuffing, which does harm

What you can leave out: “Image of” or “Photo shows” — the screen reader knows it is an image.

Purely decorative images do not need alt text. Anything that conveys something does.

And the practical side effect: if an image fails to load, the alt text appears in its place.

With naming and one pass a year — there is nothing more to do there.

When uploading:

• Meaningful file names. Not IMG_4711.
• A consistent pattern, such as area-subject-place.jpg.

Once a year:

• Which images belong to deleted pages?
• Is the same image there several times in different crops?
• Are there people on them who are no longer with the business?

The last of these is not just about order: consent to publication usually ends with the employment relationship.

And the basic rule that saves the most effort: only upload what is used. A media library is not a picture archive.

It disappears everywhere it is used — leaving a gap there.

What you should check beforehand: is it still in use? With an image that appears on three pages, you often only notice the third case weeks later.

When deleting is right:

• People on it whose consent ends or has been withdrawn. Then immediately.
• Legally problematic images.
• Images belonging to deleted pages that no longer appear anywhere.

When not:

• Just to save space. Storage is rarely the problem.
• When you are unsure. An unused image costs nothing.

And if you want to replace an image: swap it rather than deleting it and uploading a new one. Then it stays everywhere it is used.

By writing it down — when uploading, not when someone asks.

What you should record, per image:

• Where it comes from: your own shot, bought, from the photographer, from a picture library.
• Which licence — with the date and, if possible, the receipt.
• Whether there are people on it and whether there is consent.

Where to keep this: a simple table is enough. For a website with thirty images, that is thirty rows.

Why it matters: image rights infringements are pursued systematically — there are services that do this automatically. If you get a bill after three years and cannot say where the image came from, you have lost.

And keep purchase receipts. They are the only proof that counts.

Three things, all of which are decided when uploading:

1. Format: PNG with a transparent background. A logo taken from a Word document usually brings a white box with it, which becomes visible on a coloured background.
2. Size: at least 400 pixels wide, preferably more. A logo that is too small becomes blurred on modern screens, and that is noticed immediately.
3. Contrast: check it on a light and a dark background, if both occur.

If you only have the logo as a JPG: ask whoever made it for the original file. If nobody can be reached any more, a clean redrawing is worthwhile — it is not a big job.

And if you have no logo: lettering with your name is perfectly adequate to begin with.

Upload it to the media library and link to it in the text — that is all.

What to look out for:

• Say what it is. “Price list 2026 (PDF, 1.2 MB)” instead of “click here”.
• Keep an eye on the size. A 20 MB PDF takes a very long time to load on a phone.
• Check the content before you make it public: comments, tracked changes, metadata with author names and file path.
• Personal data that is in it by mistake becomes public as soon as the PDF is online.

And bear in mind: a PDF is harder to read than a page. Anything that can go on a website should go there — a PDF is only worthwhile for things people are meant to print or pass on.

Via a video service, not as a file — videos are not stored with you.

Why: a video quickly weighs a hundred megabytes, and a player that works on every device is a product in its own right.

What to look out for:

• Use the cookie-free variant where the service offers it. That simplifies your privacy notice considerably.
• Do not autoplay. That is the most reliable way to drive visitors away.
• Subtitles. Many people watch videos without sound — and people who cannot hear are otherwise excluded.
• Length. Hardly anyone watches past two minutes.

And the honest question beforehand: does it need the video? A good photo with three sentences of text is noticed more often than a film nobody starts.