Having a photo gallery on your site can be a fantastic tool as it can:
- Showcase the quality of your products – as the saying goes ‘a picture is worth 1000 words’ consumers love to see what they are buying prior to purchase.
- Create a more personable brand – a gallery can help you show ‘behind the scenes’ of your business and therefore build client loyalty.
- Keep people on your website – human brains can process images much quicker than reading text on a page. With the knowledge that you only have approximately 10 seconds to engage a person once they land on a page of your website, a gallery might be just what you need to create interest.
We build our websites using WordPress which is a very common website platform. It is highly supported and there are hundreds of different options for displaying a gallery – this means we can find the perfect one for your business. Some of my personal favourite are:
1. Classic Light Box Photo Gallery
EzyBale - http://www.ezybale.com.au/farm-photos/
This gallery is easy on the eye, with all the images cropped to the same size to give a uniform look. And you can click through on a photo to view it larger.
Benefits of this gallery, you can:
- Scroll through all the images in the larger size using arrows.
- Choose to add captions underneath the photos.
- Choose from a range of settings including the size and dimensions the images are displayed at, specify how many images to a row, add a border, change the colour scheme and much more.
- Choose to link the photos through to a page of your website for more information rather than a larger copy of the image – to see this in action visit: http://www.murraylandsfoodalliance.com.au/
- Use the lightbox gallery in a ‘tile’ view where the gallery uses the different shapes of the photos and creates a collage. In this option, the images aren’t all uniform in size, which can be a great choice if you have a mix of both landscape and portrait images to showcase. View a ‘tile’ lightbox gallery here: http://www.roemahkita.com.au/gallery/
2. Slider
Keith Sand and Metal - http://www.keithsandandmetal.com.au/
A slider does just that - ‘slides’ to the next image. The great thing about this gallery is you can showcase a range of photos in just a small section of the page, leaving lots of room on the page for additional information.
More than likely you have also seen this type of gallery showcasing feature or ‘hero’ photos as you first land on a website. These large images can make a great first impression for your business.
Coorong Wild Seafood - http://www.coorongwildseafood.com.au
The benefits of this gallery are that you can choose:
- How many images are in the slider, or have arrows for people to click through the images at a faster speed.
- To use a caption or feature text per image – in the Coorong Wild Seafood example above you can see the word ‘Harvesting’.
- The pace that the slider changes images as well as transition effects.
- The dimensions and size of the images.
3) Showcase Gallery
Minrosa – https://www.minrosa.com.au/salt-for-us-2/decor/
This gallery is idea for showcasing products. It allows you to show a large image, and then a range of thumbnail images below so that a potential customer can view a complete product range, or, different angles of the same product in a glance. They can click on the photo that captures their interest to view it as the large image.
Other benefits of this gallery include:
- The ability to add captions, or choose to go without.
- The dimensions and size of the images.
That’s my favourite 3 - but keep in mind the possibilities are endless! With hundreds of layouts and options, there is the perfect gallery out there for you
