How to take the photos your website needs with your phone

Small websites are usually let down by their photographs rather than their layout. You can write a decent paragraph about what you do, but a person deciding whether to call you wants to see the thing itself. You do not need a photographer for that. You need daylight, a cleared table, and twenty minutes with the phone already in your pocket.

Decide on six pictures before you take any

More photos do not make a better site. A few good ones do. Aim for one picture per thing you want someone to remember:

• the work itself, close up
• hands doing the thing
• your face, looking at the camera
• the answer to the question customers always ask
• the place, at the moment it looks best
• the way in, if people have to find you

A gardener's six might be a finished border, hands tying in a climber, themselves leaning on a spade, the size of a job they take on, the same border in June after the March picture, and the van. If you work from a van or a spare room, replace "the place" with whatever the customer actually sees. The list changes with the trade; the rule does not.

Before-and-after pairs are the strongest thing you can put on a small site, and they are the one kind of picture a generator cannot invent for you.

Shoot in daylight, near a window or in the shade

Your phone's flash flattens everything and turns food grey and skin waxy. Skip it.

Indoors, put the subject about a metre from the biggest window, stand with your back to that window, and turn the ceiling lights off. Outdoors, a bright cloudy day beats strong sun: the cloud softens shadows and you can see detail in what you are photographing. If the sun is out, move into the shade of a wall or tree rather than standing in the full glare.

Take the picture in the morning or late afternoon if the light through your window is harsh at midday.

Clean the background, then step closer

Look at everything behind your subject before you press the button. The bin, the pile of paperwork, the car on the pavement, the half-finished mug. Move them, or move yourself two steps to one side until they are out of frame.

Then step in. Nearly every first attempt is taken from too far back, so the thing you are selling fills a third of the picture. Fill the frame with it. Tap the screen where you want the camera to focus, and take three shots instead of one, moving slightly between them. One will be sharp.

Hold the phone level: a tilted doorway is hard to unsee.

Avoid stock photographs, and be careful with borrowed ones

Stock pictures of smiling people in an office say nothing about you, and the same image sits on other sites. It is evidence of nothing, which is the opposite of what a photo is for.

Pictures you find in a search belong to whoever made them. Do not put them on your site. If someone else's photo is the only option, ask them in writing whether you can use it and what credit they want.

For people: ask before you publish a picture where a customer or a neighbour can be recognised, and never publish a photograph of somebody else's child. A picture of your own hands at work needs no permission and tells the visitor plenty.

What to do with the files afterwards

A phone camera makes very large files. Keep the originals in one folder you will still find next year, and upload copies:

• Resize before uploading. A photo straight from a phone can be 4000 pixels wide. Around 1600 pixels is plenty for a full-width picture, and much less for a small one. Serving a smaller file to a narrow screen is the difference between a page that appears and a page that hangs: Mozilla's guide to responsive images works through an example where the small version of one picture is 63KB against 128KB for the large one.
• Name the files in words. greenhouse-border-june.jpg beats IMG_4821.jpg, for you and for search results.
• Write the text alternative. Each picture needs a short line describing what it shows, because some visitors hear the page rather than see it. The W3C's images tutorial is the reference: describe the information the picture carries, and keep it brief. A decorative background gets an empty alternative.
• Check the crop on a phone. A wide shot of your workshop shrinks to a strip on a phone. If the important part is small, take a closer version too.

Run this list before you build anything

• Six pictures, one for each thing you want remembered
• Daylight, no flash
• Background cleared
• Subject filling the frame
• Three shots of each, one will be straight
• Originals saved in one folder
• Files renamed in words
• A short description written for each
• Permission for anyone recognisable

That is a morning's work, and it stays useful. Sitewright is not built yet; the waitlist on the home page is the only thing open, and this list is the part you can start today.