{"id":1164,"date":"2021-01-27T18:01:51","date_gmt":"2021-01-27T18:01:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.clearimaging.com\/blog\/?p=1164"},"modified":"2021-01-27T18:01:52","modified_gmt":"2021-01-27T18:01:52","slug":"pro-tip-dont-use-stock-photos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.clearimaging.com\/?p=1164","title":{"rendered":"Pro Tip: Don&#8217;t use stock photos!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I want you to join me on a movement. It&#8217;s called: Stop the\nStock. Stock photography is ruining websites, costing businesses in lost\nrevenue and killing the sea turtles and it&#8217;s time we put an end to this! <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ok, maybe I&#8217;m getting carried away but this is a real issue\nwhich not many people are addressing because it is a &#8216;new normal&#8217;, but it is\nFAR from optimum. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We can&#8217;t deny how convenient it is to just &#8216;grab&#8217; some\nphotos, chuck them on to your website and voila! Done! Well, that&#8217;s great that\nwe solved the problem of finding photos of a house under construction, or an\noffice space, but did we also just CREATE a new problem for ourselves without\nrealizing it? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Yes, we have! <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A website is supposed to communicate reality, real things in\nthe world, that prospect can see and touch. When you use a fake photo you are\nessentially making yourself &#8216;not real&#8217;. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What you gain in convenience and time, you lose in\ncredibility. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>On the web, credibility is EVERYTHING!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Let me repeat that with some more exclamations: on the web\ncredibility is EVERYTHING! <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>People don&#8217;t know you, they don&#8217;t trust you, why would you\ndo something that conceals reality! People WANT the reality, they want the\ntruth, even if the photos don&#8217;t look as good, at least they are real. And that\ngoes a long way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There is a place for stock photography, sure. But when you\nare depicting your services, your customers, your products, your business, your\nstaff, partners, locations, offices, spaces, the photos MUST NOT be stock. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think TV commercials are to blame. They&#8217;re all actors,\npretending to be happy customers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m looking for a bookkeeper in my local area and I land on a website and I see a big photo of a bunch of men dressed in suits, clearly a stock photo, all photo-shopped with perfect lighting and smiles. Who the hell are these guys? I&#8217;m looking for a real person to call; not a representation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Whether or not the prospect can articulate it, it is in the\nback of their mind and they achieve a much stronger bond with the company that\nhas real photos, as opposed to stock. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And you need that bond if you&#8217;re going to convince them to do business with you, so, just stop the stock! I want to hear you say it! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I want you to join me on a movement. It&#8217;s called: Stop the Stock. Stock photography is ruining websites, costing&#8230; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1165,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,11],"tags":[185],"class_list":["post-1164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-website-improvement","category-website-tips","tag-web-design"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.clearimaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.clearimaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.clearimaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.clearimaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.clearimaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1164"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.clearimaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1166,"href":"https:\/\/blog.clearimaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1164\/revisions\/1166"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.clearimaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.clearimaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.clearimaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.clearimaging.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}