Photos for your website.

Nothing on a service-business website does more work than a photo of a real job. It proves you do the work, shows the standard you hold, and makes the site yours in a way no sentence can. A phone is enough. The counts and shapes below are the Horizon framework's, so if you are filling in the online form, this is the list.

The fourteen photos.

Your website uses photos in four places. Everything else on the page is text, and the prepare page covers that.

• Hero, the top of the page. One photo, wide. Your headline sits on top of it. Your best single photo: you or your crew at work, or a finished job.
• Services. Four photos, horizontal. One per service, showing that service being done or the result.
• Recent work. Eight photos, close to square. Finished jobs. A before-and-after pair counts as two.
• About. One photo, horizontal. You, or you and your crew, looking at the camera.

All but the about photo are pictures of work, so photograph the next few jobs and you will have most of them. The preview shows exactly where each one lands.The live framework shows exactly where each one lands. It has placeholder text in brackets where your details go, and the empty image slots are these photos.

How to shoot them.

Six habits cover almost everything. None of them needs a real camera.

Use daylight.

Outdoors, early morning and the last hour before sunset flatter everything, including a roof. At midday, keep the sun behind you, not behind the subject. Indoors, open the blinds and turn on every light. Leave the flash off; it flattens faces and glares off tile and metal.

Turn the phone sideways.

Every slot except the gallery is wider than it is tall, and the gallery tiles are close to square. A tall photo gets cropped to fit, and you lose the top and bottom. Hold the phone sideways with two hands and tuck your elbows in to keep it steady.

Step back, then step in.

Take two of each shot: one far enough back to show the whole job, and one close enough to show the detail, a clean solder joint, a straight fence line, an even coat of paint. The wide one goes in the gallery; the close one often makes the better service photo. Do not use the zoom; walk closer instead.

Clear the clutter.

Spend one minute moving what does not belong: the coffee cup, the extension cord, the customer's laundry. Wipe fingerprints off anything shiny. Tidy work reads as careful work, and a homeowner judges the whole company by what is in the frame.

Shoot before and after as a pair.

Take the before when you arrive and the after when you finish, from the same spot, at the same height, pointing the same way. Matching framing is what makes the pair convincing. Two or three pairs do more than eight finished shots, because they show the problem you solve, not just the result.

Put people in the frame, with permission.

A person doing the job is stronger than the job alone. Ask your crew before their faces go online. Ask the customer before you photograph anything that identifies the home: the front of the house, the house number, a car in the driveway. If a homeowner would rather not, shoot the work, not the room.

Notes on each slot.

The hero.

Spend the most time here. It runs the full width of the screen with your headline over it, so it needs a calm composition: the subject in the middle third, the busiest part of the picture out of the center where the headline sits, and nothing important near the edges. A slightly darker photo works better than a bright one, because white text has to stay readable on top of it. Take ten. Pick one.

The four service photos.

One per service, and each should be obviously that service: a water heater for water heaters, an open panel for panel upgrades, a fresh lawn for sod. If a homeowner can guess the service from the photo alone, it is the right photo.

The eight work photos.

Finished jobs, as varied as you can make them: different job types, different houses, different seasons. The tiles are close to square, so keep the subject centered and the crop will not cut it off. Put your before-and-after pairs here, side by side.

The about photo.

You, or you and the people who show up to the job, in front of the truck or a finished project. Look at the camera. This is the photo that turns a phone number into a person, so it should look like the person who will knock on the door.

What to avoid.

• Blurry. Tap the subject on the screen to focus, hold still, and take three of everything. If the edges look soft when you zoom in afterward, shoot it again.
• Dark. If you cannot tell what the photo shows at a glance, neither can a customer. Add light or come back at a better hour.
• Stock photos. Homeowners can tell. Watermarked stock is worse: it looks borrowed, and usually it was.
• Other people's logos. A manufacturer's badge on a unit you installed is fine. A photo built around another company's brand, another contractor's truck or a competitor's yard sign is not yours to use, and it points the customer at them.
• Screenshots and texted copies. Messaging apps shrink photos. Use the original from your camera roll.
• Anything the customer would not want online. Faces, house numbers, license plates, and anything in the home that is not the work.

Files and sizes, in plain terms.

The file your phone makes is the file to send. Do not resize, compress or filter it first. A big file can always be made smaller to fit the framework; a small one can never be made sharp again. A few megabytes per photo is normal.

JPEG (.jpg) is the safe format everywhere. Newer iPhones save HEIC by default, which is fine for shooting; for plain JPEGs, set Formats to Most Compatible in the Camera section of Settings. Most Android phones save JPEG already.

Upload them in the online form, straight from your phone. If you are stuck choosing between two, send the sharper one.

The checklist.

• One hero photo, wide, subject in the middle third, center kept calm for the headline.
• Four service photos, horizontal, one per service.
• Eight work photos, with two or three before-and-after pairs.
• One about photo, you or your crew, looking at the camera.
• Daylight, phone sideways, clutter cleared, focus tapped.
• Permission from everyone in the frame and from the homeowner.
• Original files, not screenshots or texted copies.

Photos are one part of the online form. The prepare page lists everything else to have ready, so the form takes 15 to 20 minutes instead of an evening.