Someone in Kelowna Has to Type What the Picture Shows

Last Wednesday afternoon I sat down with a coffee and pulled the code behind a couple of dozen Kelowna homepages.

Not to look at the design. I was after one field, the same field, on every photograph I could find on every page.

My script pulled that field off every photograph it could find, and by four o’clock I had a long list of blanks with the odd entry scattered through it.

Set that against the other cities I checked and Kelowna came out 21 of 24. Nothing else in the whole audit here finishes anywhere near that low.

The town does well almost everywhere else I look, which is exactly why I keep saying that an afternoon and no budget goes further here than a rebuild does.

The card nobody prints

Every photo you put on a website arrives with an empty slot beside it.

Picture the little card holder screwed to the front of a shelf in a shop, the one that’s supposed to tell you what’s in the jars. The jars are lovely. The card is blank.

Someone has to print that card. Nothing prints it for you, and no theme, plugin or camera will do it on your behalf.

When did anyone last print one on your site?

On the average site here, 52.3% of the photos have that slot filled in, where the figure across everything I audited is 54.9%.

Two readers care. Google, because a photograph on its own tells a search engine nothing about what you sell, and the software that reads a page out loud for a customer who can’t see it, which meets your blank card with a second of silence.

Why it’s the last thing anyone does

A bare photo looks perfect.

It loads, it’s pretty, it sits exactly where the designer put it, and the empty slot is invisible to the only person who could go and fill it in.

Everything else I check announces itself when it breaks. This one never does.

I’m not preaching from a clean sheet either. There’s a site I built in 2019 with more photographs on it than I care to count, and I described maybe a dozen of them before I got bored and promised myself I’d come back to it.

So what do the sites that get it done actually do differently? I went looking, because I wanted to steal it.

They fill it in during the upload

Nobody who has a fully described website did it as a project.

There was no rainy Sunday spent on two hundred old images. There was a person who simply never put a bare photo on a page, filling the slot in the same minute the picture went up, while they could still remember what they were looking at.

How many pictures have gone up on your site since the last time a person touched that field? Later never comes. I’ve watched later not come for years on sites I built myself.

One person owns the pictures

On the tidy sites I can usually name that person. It’s the office manager, or the owner’s daughter, or the one employee who likes the camera and gets asked to bring it.

On the untidy ones anybody can add a photo and nobody is answerable for any of them, so the pictures that go up during a busy week go up bare and stay that way.

Naming that person is a small part of what looking after a website means week to week, and it’s the part that gets dropped first when the name belongs to nobody in particular.

Who put the last photograph on your website? If you had to stop and think about that, you already know how the rest of this goes.

They describe the frame, not the job

Bad entries are everywhere, and some of them are worse than an empty slot.

“Image.” “Photo 4.” “Our work.” The filename the camera invented, letters and numbers, sitting there where a sentence should be.

The good ones read like a person describing the shot down the phone to a friend. A cedar deck rebuilt on a lakefront home, late afternoon light on it. One line, no cleverness, done.

Flower shops write those lines better than nearly every trade I rank, which figures in a business where the picture is openly the product.

Could you describe your homepage photos that way, right now, without opening them?

They throw out the pictures that came with the theme

Every website template arrives stocked with strangers. Smiling people in an office nobody in your company has ever visited.

Nobody labels those, because nobody thinks of them as theirs. They’re the first blanks I find in a scan and the easiest thing on this whole list to deal with, because deleting is quicker than writing.

If a photo isn’t of you, your work, or your building, what exactly is it doing there?

They check again after a rebuild

The descriptions live with the image rather than with the page, so a redesign that re-uploads every picture into a new system tends to leave the writing behind on the old one.

I’ve watched a site go from nearly complete to nearly empty over a launch weekend, and nobody involved did a single thing wrong on purpose.

So the habit is a dull one. After a rebuild, whoever owns the pictures opens three of them and checks that the slot survived.

They keep fewer photos

The sites that describe everything have less to describe.

Twelve real photographs of work you actually did will beat a gallery of eighty, and not only for this reason. Someone chose those twelve, and a stranger can feel that in about four seconds.

How many photographs are on your site this morning, honestly? An enormous gallery is nearly always a decision that nobody actually made.

What this is worth

I’d love to tell you a described photo brings you customers. It doesn’t, not on its own.

What it does is stop your best evidence from going unread. Of the 2,951 websites I could open in this town, the ones I’d hire from are the ones showing real photos of real work, and a good chunk of that evidence is sitting there with nothing attached to it.

And the customer whose phone reads pages aloud to her gets a tour of your business with every picture quietly removed from it, which has nothing to do with search engines at all.

If the person who used to look after this left two jobs ago, I do this work here every week. And if you’d rather hand the whole site to someone and be told what’s wrong with it, my audit form is where that starts.

Do one thing, ignore the rest

Ignore everything above. All of it, including the parts I sat up late writing.

Open your homepage on your phone tonight and count the photographs a person sees before she scrolls. Usually four, sometimes five. Get those described and stop.

The box you want is labeled alt text on most systems and description on the rest, and it sits with the image rather than with the page.

Not the gallery. Not the archive from the year you bought the good camera. The first screen, because those are the pictures a stranger actually meets.

Then go to bed. You’ll have done more for that page in ten minutes than the last redesign did in six weeks.