Back to Acupuncture Website Design Guide.

This is the Griffen Mill Design Guide to designing websites for acupuncturists. This section focusses on the use of photographs as well as images such as diagrams or illustrations. Other parts of the guide focus on colour, shape and aesthetic designs and making appropriate content and copywriting decisions. Click to return to the main guide.

You can take them yourself, but these days online image libraries are a fantastic resource of high quality, low cost and immense choice. In fact there are so many images online, that it is useful to experiment with keywords to find just what you are looking for.

The obvious starting point for an image for an acupuncture website is to search for acupuncture, or acupuncturist. However depending on how the photographer has tagged their image, it may not find everything that you may be looking for. Try searching for needles or treatment perhaps. The other approach you can take is to type in mood keywords such as relaxing, as the emotional content of the website is all important. Once you have found an image that is close to what you are looking for, there may also be an option to 'see more like this', which will show you similar images that might just hit the mark.

A short list of words you might try for an acupuncturist may include: complementary, treatment, medicine, anatomy, needles, health, massage, healing, calm, holistic, balance, well-being, relaxing, mind and therapy.

We often use Shutterstock for images for acupuncture websites, as we find they have a good range of high quality photographs.

Images such as this of an acupuncture model shows relevance to the in-depth knowledge and understanding that this ancient medicine has with the human anatomy and the science behind it. This can give reassurance to the client about this alternative therapy.

This image of a woman having treatment shows how the practice is not painful or uncomfortable, a common misconception about having an acupuncture treatment. A calm and relaxed subject can help to show the healing properties of this practice.

This image shows the delicacy of the needles and the gentle action of the practitioner within treatment. These sorts of images must be used sensitively within an acupuncture website.

Not all acupuncturists wish to display images of needles or of treatments taking place. A natural image such as this of light shining though blades of grass with water droplets can be just as effective at showing the healing properties of the practice.