How do I create visuals to support my business right now?

- [George] Hi, I'm George Maestri, staff instructor in the creative library here at LinkedIn Learning. Let's take a look at ways to create high-quality visuals to support your business. If you're setting up an online presence, be it email, a website, Instagram or Facebook, you'll get a much better response if your visual materials look good. High-quality visuals need not be expensive or time-consuming if you know where to find them or how to create them. Let's explore the many resources available that can help you create high-quality visuals that will have a lasting impact on your business. Creating a website for your business is often the first stop in creating an online presence. We start with a template, which is just an outline of your site. There are a number of services that provide web templates and hosting. For free alternatives, you can turn to services such as Wix or WordPress.com. These have a variety of templates, and are a good basic way to get started. Paid services such as Squarespace offer beautiful templates along with backend services, such as E-commerce. They also offer a much higher level of support to help keep you in business. If you want to go full custom, you can certainly hire a web design service that can do most of the work. This can take time and money, so budget accordingly. Next, you need to add visuals. Visuals are probably the most important part of your online persona. A good web template, for example, is still just an empty page. It needs to be filled with high-quality photographs and graphics. Instagram and Facebook feeds also demand good-looking images. Making or obtaining these visuals can be a challenge if you're not creatively inclined. Photography can quickly tell the story of your business, products and services. High-quality photography can be obtained from a variety of sources. Existing images are one source. You may already have photographs available from previous photo shoots of your business. You could also search Instagram or other feeds for customer generated images, which could be used with their permission. Photography can also be obtained using internet services and stock photography sites. Sites such as Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, Getty, and many others can provide high-quality images for a small fee. You can also search public domain sites such as Pexels and DreamsTime and others for free images. With any stock service, some images can seem a bit generic, so try to find images that are unique, and speak to what your business represents. You'll also need to pay attention to terms of use for stock images so you use them properly. In addition to stock images, you can certainly create your own photographs from scratch, or hire a professional to create them for you. This often takes a bit more time and effort, but the results are tailored precisely to your needs. In addition to photos, you'll probably need design and graphics such as illustration, icons, logos, flyers and more. Like photography, you can do it yourself and create your own. You can hire it out, or you can use online web services to get results more quickly. For online services, Adobe Spark is a free service that helps you create all sorts of graphics from social media to webpages, videos, and more. Canva is another popular service that offers one-stop shopping for online design. The site is incredibly easy to use, and offers both free and paid design templates for everything from flyers to logos to company branding. And if you want to dive deeper, you can certainly do it yourself. Or you can hire a professional designer to help you get exactly what you need. Again, this takes time, effort and resources. As you can see, you don't have to be a creative professional to get high-quality visuals for your online presence. There are a wealth of online services and resources that can help you get the visual look that you want quickly and easily. If you want to learn more or want to do it yourself, we have courses here at LinkedIn Learning that cover all of these surfaces, software, applications and more. Regardless of how you create or obtain the visuals that support your business, good visuals are one of the best ways to attract and retain customers.