I'm a Web Designer Who Knows Better. I've Been Putting Off Brand Photos for Years.

If you've spent any time on this blog, you know I think a lot about what patients see when they land on a provider's website. Photos come up regularly — not just whether you have them, but whether they actually reflect the practice behind them. Generic stock photography. Clinic interiors that could belong to anyone. Images that were clearly an afterthought.

I know what good brand photography does for a website. I've told clients, directly and more than once, that their site will only go so far without photos that actually reflect who they are.

My own website has been making do without them for years.

Not because I don't know better. I do. But the reasons it kept not happening are probably familiar to anyone who has been putting off something similar, so I'm going to tell you what they actually were and what finally changed.

What I had instead

My website has a couple of photos of me. They're good photos — taken by professional photographers during a couple of different sessions with my husband for holiday cards, with a few individual shots mixed in.

But they weren't taken for my business. They weren't taken with any thought about what I was trying to communicate professionally, what my brand feels like, or how they'd sit alongside everything else on the site.

So I worked around them. I didn't want to fill the gaps with stock photography that looked generic, so I leaned into icons instead — clean, minimal, they do a job. The result is a website that's fine. Clean, functional, deliberately put together. But lacking something. Built around the absence of the right photos rather than around photos that were actually made for it.

Why I kept putting it off

The honest answer is the same reason most of my own business tasks take longer than they should: the things I do for clients regularly, without much friction, become surprisingly hard when I'm my own client. I'd rather work on someone else's website than my own.

I also had a theoretically free option sitting right in front of me. My husband is a photographer — that was originally the plan. We just never got around to actually doing it. When something feels infinitely available, it's surprisingly easy to keep not doing it. Booking someone and paying a deposit has a way of making things actually happen.

And there's another layer to this. Even if I had the time and the motivation, doing this work for myself means doing it without the one thing that makes it most useful — an outside perspective. When I work with a client, I can see what they can't: the things that feel ordinary to them because they've been doing it long enough, the language they use when they're not trying to market themselves, what their patients notice that they've stopped noticing. I can't give myself that. Hiring someone isn't just about offloading a task. It's about getting the view from outside your own business that you genuinely cannot manufacture on your own.

What finally changed

Spring break rolled around. People were out of town, and no one was asking me for anything. The usual excuses evaporated, and I had a stretch of focused time with no good reason not to use it on my own business.

So I went back through my website with fresh eyes — clarifying my POV, rewriting sections that weren't quite landing, updating the copy to reflect where things actually are now. And somewhere in that process, I hit a wall I couldn't write my way around.

The words were getting there. But I could see clearly that my website was never going to look the way I wanted it to look without photos that were actually made for it. Not borrowed from another context. Not just fine. Made intentionally, for my business, to communicate what I'm actually trying to say.

That's when it stopped feeling optional.

I've started conversations with a photographer whose work feels right for what I'm trying to do. We haven't done the shoot yet. I'll write about that part when we get there. But I wanted to document this part too — the part where I finally stopped waiting — because I think it's the part most people skip over.

The thing I'd tell a provider in the same position

Don't wait until everything else is perfect. The photos are part of what pulls everything together.

And while they can be better than nothing, don't talk yourself into phone photos, a friend with a good camera, or the photos from that event two years ago that aren't bad. You know they're not right. You've known for a while. The longer you wait, the more your website communicates something slightly off from what you actually are.

Book the shoot. I'll let you know how it goes.