The new website is taking shape. The copy sounds like you. The colors are right. Someone has finally retired the font everyone secretly disliked.
Then your designer asks for photographs.
You open the company folder. There’s a team picture with two people who have left, a surprisingly good office photo that’s too small to use, and a collection of headshots taken against several apparently unrelated walls.
There are photographs. Whether they can do the jobs your new website needs is another question.
A website redesign is a good opportunity to think that through. Bring photography into the conversation while the pages are being planned, and you can build a collection around what the business needs to show.
Start with the pages, then plan the pictures.
Your About page might need to introduce the people a client will actually work with. A services page might need to make an unfamiliar process understandable. A recruiting page might need to give someone a sense of the place they would spend their working day.
Those are different assignments for a photograph.
Before building a shot list, ask what a visitor should understand after looking at each page. “We need an office photo” becomes much more useful when it turns into “We want prospective clients to see how closely our team works together.”
Now there’s something to photograph.
It also helps to look at what makes your business recognizable. The materials you work with. The way you explain something to a customer. The care that goes into a finished piece. The people who know how to solve the difficult problems.
A photograph of everyone gathered around a laptop may be appropriate. But if your work happens in a workshop, a clinic, or on a construction site, that’s probably where the more interesting story lives.
Your designer should be part of this conversation.
A beautiful photograph can still be the wrong shape for the space it needs to fill. A wide homepage banner might need room for a headline. A portrait may need to work in both a narrow team-page layout and a square crop. On a phone, the edges of an image may disappear entirely.
These are useful things to know before the shoot.
Rough layouts are enough to start. Knowing where the text will sit or which images need several crop options changes how a photograph is composed. It’s considerably easier to leave space beside someone while photographing them than to discover later that the headline needs to sit across their face.
Then think a little beyond launch day.
While the team is together and the location is prepared, there may be opportunities to make photographs for recruiting, presentations, proposals, or upcoming announcements.
The useful question is: what else do you already know you’ll need?
That keeps the scope purposeful. A website project doesn’t have to become an attempt to photograph everything the business might ever do. But planning a few related uses can give the resulting collection a much longer working life.
This is what I mean by a brand photo library: a coordinated collection of photographs of your business, made with real uses in mind. People, spaces, work, and details that belong together, with enough variety to serve different purposes.
Before your planning call, gather a few simple things:
The pages you’re building, even if they’re only a rough list.
Existing photographs you still like and want to keep.
Examples of what no longer reflects the business.
Any layouts or visual direction from your designer.
Other uses you already have in mind for the images.
You don’t need to arrive with a finished shot list. Deciding what to photograph is part of the work we can do together.
If a website refresh is on your calendar, bring me into the conversation while there’s still room to plan. We can work with your designer to make photographs that fit the site and give your team something useful to reach for after it launches.
Ideally, in a folder everyone can actually find.