This poster has been making its way around the web for a while now, and corny as it is, I always laugh. (By the way, if you’re the one who designed it originally, let me know and I’ll give you credit, and if you can’t get this out of your head now, here’s a link to the video.) Funny as it is, if you do a google image search for Lionel Ritchie, you’ll find there are a lot of options the designer could have chosen for Lionel’s head shot on the poster. This is definitely the most timely, and it made the poster perfect.
Along these lines, clients often ask me if they should have photos of themselves on their web sites. Ten years ago, many more of them were skittish about it; there was some conventional wisdom that it would bring stalkers, hackers, and identity thieves into your life if you posted a photo of yourself on the internet. Nowadays, social media has made that argument a lot less common, and the issue is more one of choosing which photos of you are available to the world, and which ones you keep to your smaller social circles, controlled by the privacy settings on sites like Facebook and Instagram. What goes on your business web site, then, becomes the photo most available to the public, most likely to show up in Google’s image search, and most important to represent who you are professionally.
So, how do you know whether you should have one at all?
You do not NEED a photo of yourself on your site if:
No one who is buying your product will ever see you. This is probably a small group of online-only retailers, but they truly are not looking to make a personal connection with the people who buy their products. That doesn’t mean that they won’t have good customer service or respond to inquiries or support their products, but that they aren’t interested in anyone connecting with the owners. That’s totally ok. If that’s how you want to run your company, then there’s no need to put a photograph of yourself on the site.
- You have no means of getting a clean, well-lit photo of yourself. At this point, it’s hard to imagine that you don’t at least know someone with a smart phone that has a nice built-in camera. However, if you don’t and if you don’t have a photo of you, alone, with a neutral background and good lighting, then it’s better not to put up a photo of you at all. The photo to the right here may very well be of a totally competant, organized, professional woman, but it definitely doesn’t tell that story about her.
You do need a photo of yourself on your site if:
You are a service provider who will meet in person with your clients. If you are going to counsel your clients in any way in person, it will be very helpful to them if they can see what you look like ahead of time. Like it or not, it makes a difference. They will be spending a fair amount of time with their attorney, their accountant, their architect, their landscape artist, their web developer, their marketing manager, their office IT consultant, etc., and the relationship can start — just a little bit — when they recognize you in person before they walk in the door the first time. It takes any concern about surprises out of the equation — for example, if your name is Chris Johnson, and they are expecting a man, and actually, Chris is short for Christina. This is triple-true if you are going to put your hands on your clients — if you are, for example, a massage therapist, yoga instructor, makeup artist, tailor, tattoo artist, hair stylist, or medical professional of any kind.
- Your personal story has anything to do with your product. Remember how I said above that if your customers will never meet you in person, you don’t need a photo? Well, you don’t NEED one, but you might want to have one there anyway.I remember when my older daughter was a baby, we watched the adult-mind-numbing but baby-stimulating Baby Einstein videos several times, and in the video, the original founder of Baby Einstein spoke for several minutes about why she started her company. She was a mom and had wanted calming visual images for her babies and toddlers. She spoke softly and briefly to describe her vision, and twelve years later, I am remembering it still. I’ll never meet her, but it really personalized the product when I saw her sitting there with her kids. I had kids! She had kids! She made this product! I will probably like this product! Of course, it’s not exactly that simple, but the connotation added to my general sense of belief in what she was selling. If you think your customers would be swayed by your story, then your photo belongs up there on your web site, right next to the story itself.
- You would like to get some public speaking gigs or publicity about your business. Even if the above items don’t apply, you might want a relatable photo on your site — or, at minimum, on a LinkedIn account you link to from your site somewhere. People like to see who they’re considering for a speaking engagement, and newspapers/other media need a photo to run with their fabulous profile of you and your company.
If you decide to use a photo of yourself on your site, here are some tips about how it should look:
- Put yourself together in whatever way your customers and clients will see you in person. If you are a yoga instructor, wear your coolest yoga pants and top. If you are an attorney, wear a suit. You get the picture — if you only wear a suit to weddings and funerals, don’t wear one in the photo on your site. If you want to do social media consulting for businesses, don’t wear a bikini in your photo.
- Set the photo in either your storefront/office, if you have one, or in a neutral location. Examples of neutral locations include: brick walls, beaches, sunny fields, photographers’ backdrops, conference tables, and desks. Poor choices are crowded streets, bars/restaurants/cafes, wedding receptions, and your couch. Of course, if your business is conducted in unusual locations — like a former client of mine who was a safety inspector for a roofers union — then you might like to have your photo taken in the place where you do your work. (For the record, I’m glad he never asked me to climb up there with him to get a good shot!)
- Consider the background color of your web site when you pick the background of your photo. If your web site has a patterned background of blue and purple, your photo should be a solid, contrasting but complimentary color. If your site has a white background, your photo should NOT have a white background, or it will look like you are floating in air.
- Be as natural as possible. Fake grins or expressions that are unnaturally serious are easy to spot. Be yourself!
For what it’s worth, I’ve been meaning to have professional photos taken forever and ever, and it’s on my list for this year — but for now, I have a nice clean photo of myself in a timeless black shirt against a white background, taken with my own camera. I’m smiling the way I do when you see me in person, and I took the time before the shutter clicked to imagine meeting a new client in person and how I’d want to present myself. I’m satisfied with that; it didn’t cost me a cent, and now I know that when someone calls me, it’s really me they’re looking for.
If you’d like a candid opinion of whether or not you should use a photo of yourself on your site, or whether the photo you have is sending the right impression, feel free to get in touch. I’d be happy to give you my thoughts.