.avif)
Yes, a site with the right keywords that loads fast is essential to being visible in search engines. But no, an ugly site that ranks well is not enough. Design is the first thing your visitors notice, and their first impression of you depends partly on it. Google also gives more and more weight to user experience when it ranks sites.
Conversion rate depends largely on the experience, whether that is an interview, a professional meeting or anything in daily life. Improving the user experience therefore means presenting a good-looking site with quality image choices. Choosing the images is critical, and this article gives you some advice on it.
How to choose the theme
Choosing one image is not necessarily the hard part ; the hard part is finding several that follow one theme and hold together across your site. Try to stay with photos in more or less the same style, with close or similar colours, so the site holds together as a whole.
Avoid images that are too traditional ; do not fall into the trap of the many soulless lawyer websites (harsh words, but that is the hard reality) that put up scales, handshakes and other symbols of justice. Building a personal site is how you stand apart from the competition, and for most of your clients the courthouse is a building like any other, one they do not know and that stirs no emotion in them.
.png)
If you have no idea, take no risk and follow the trends. Put that way it sounds contradictory with standing apart, but you can find inspiration in a trend that works well and then set yourself apart through the choice of photos. Here are some examples:
- The dark mode, or dark design : a design that is dark, more restful and less aggressive than white ones. This trend puts colourful elements forward and improves visual ergonomics, which makes navigation easier for users. For this style of site you have two main options on images: dark images that blend into the overall style, which puts the text content forward, or conversely light, almost white images, that stand out and contrast with the background of the site.
- The abstract design : painting, patterns, textures. This design gives you freedom in the choice of your photos, which lets you have a design and a style of your own. It works in a range of situations, whether building a deconstructed site with irregular geometric shapes, or designing a gentle site where it is easy to find images in every shade of colour.
- City photos? : careful. Far too many Paris law firm sites show the courthouse, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe. The same goes for every large city, each with its landmark places. Going in that direction is not a bad idea, but choose a few photos with real artistry or originality, with good light, that sit well in your site (above all with your background).
- 3D renders : easier than ever now AI has arrived. Images using geometric shapes or other visual elements in three dimensions. That gives your site a style of its own through prompts, and creates a very pleasing harmony on some sites. Take the brand new site of the firm Veil Jourde.
To go further and give you some inspiration, we wrote an article on the 2024 trends in websites: See our top trends for 2024
That said, do not tie yourself in knots trying to over-interpret the possible reactions, particularly if you choose abstract photos where the point is an attractive overall design without any real meaning. Some of your passions can be good inspiration for your website. If you love the mountains, the sea, photography, painting... Your sector can also be a good source of inspiration. Here, the site of Hervé Kobo, who specialises in public transport contracts.
Where do you find images?
Grab your camera or your latest phone, a plane ticket to Bali, and take some fine photos. More seriously: if you have a gift for photography, why not, and otherwise use royalty-free image libraries. There is a large quantity of free images, which will do the job perfectly well, and some paid ones if you fall in love with them.
Here are a few free image libraries:
And paid ones, if you find nothing you like on the others:
- Shutterstock : photos, vector images and videos (paid).
AI again, always
Today you can generate images quickly on Photoshop or with Midjourney or Dall-E. From nothing, only a prompt, or by taking an image and generating an extension of it. Handy for staying within a theme and having a site with overall harmony.
No images at all?
A website, for the sake of looks, has to have images. Well, no, it is entirely possible to have a site with no images, or very few, and a very handsome result. Airy content, pictograms, drawings. There are alternatives to images that can give you an attractive result.
Take the firm Talt which uses pencil drawings for a very clean result that gives it a genuinely pleasant identity, or the firm Emeriane with geometric shapes (and a few images, but really discreet ones; you could easily imagine pictograms or something else in their place).
A quick reminder: putting the images on your site
Before you put a photo on your site, do not forget to use a suitable image format. Not PNG, but the format WEBP. There are free online converters. Remember to compress YOUR images, so you do not hurt the performance of your site. But you know all that already, because you have probably read our article on SEO for lawyers: read the article.
.jpg)
.webp){kind=small}