Design your way

A good photography website is vital to any modern photographer.

It is how your clients will find you.

Even if you don’t use the internet very often yourself, many, many people do and you will need to create a photography website if you want them to find your business.

Even if photography is just a hobby, a photography website can be a great way to connect with other photography enthusiasts. It will allow people to view your work, and you could possibly even end up making a bit of cash off of it.

Designing a photography website is its own challenge. It’s not simply enough to upload an album of your photography to a website and call it a day. As image-heavy as the best photography website examples are, there’s actually quite a bit of consideration in their layout.

Here are some photography website ideas to help you out so you can build your business or hobby successfully online.

Purpose

What does a photography website need? Well, photos, obviously, but it should also have focus. What kind of photography do you do? Is it in the studio or do you largely do outdoor shoots? Is it event photography? Wedding photography? You photography website should answer these questions easily.

Figuring out how to design a photography website is mostly about figuring out what you want to communicate with it. Information should be clear and the photography website design should be easily navigable with only a few clicks. Website visitors are not just browsing, like they might at a shop.

They are at your website for a reason. You only have a few seconds to make it clear that possible customers should choose you over your competitors.

Remember, the purpose of your website should guide every decision you make when building a photography website.

Target Demographic

It’s important to know who you are making your photography website to appeal to. Photography website best practices work much like physical photography portfolio best practices. Wedding photographers, for instance, structure their portfolios and photography websites in similar ways. Clean, white, and easy to find what the customer to navigate.

Your photography website should call to mind the sort of event or subject you want to take photos of. If you photograph children and families, have some elements that are kid friendly. Your photography website design should be aimed to appeal toy our target demographic.

Simplicity

Avoid adding too many flashy effects or overcrowded pages. You want your photos to be front and center. Anything that detracts from them should be avoided. Your previous work is going to be your biggest selling point. You aren’t selling your clever tricks with web design or Photoshop, after all!

Show off your work and relevant information. Make it easy for anyone who is interested in your work to contact you. A good photography website needs little else.

Show Off Your Best Work

When starting a photography website, remember that it features your best photography, not all of your photography. No one is going to view all of your shots when visiting your photography website, so choose the ones that look best.

Keep the phots on your site updated regularly, especially if you photograph events like weddings. Visitors looking to hire you will be able to tell from the dress styles how old the images are.

Experiment with what photos work best. Don’t get locked into a particular set. Different pieces may help you get more traffic and therefore more customers. Start and end with your best photos on your gallery page. Keep some variation in the middle. This should have visitors keep clicking ‘next image’. They will leave with a good impression of your photography skills.

Using ‘Hero Photos’

Large images or ‘hero photos’ can help out your photography website immensely. Site visitors are there to see your work, so why not put it right out there? These massive dramatic images draw visitors in almost immediately, especially if they are very good photos that you’ve taken.

These photos should show off what your brand is all about. Show off photos you’ve taken of beautiful weddings, beautiful landscapes, adorable children, and happy families. Pick an image that is worth a thousand words. Choosing the right ‘hero photo’ can prompt a serious improvement in your business.

Protect Your Work

One of the most important things you must do when figuring out how to create a photography website is figuring out how to protect your work. Photo theft is a serious problem on the internet, no matter what you are photographing. It’s going take more than disabling right click or putting all your images as background images.

The tech savvy photo thieves of today’s internet will beat those measures.

The only truly effective way to protect your photos is to embed watermarks on them. If you embed watermarks in JPGs, it will always be there. The thieves can’t remove it. The bigger the watermark is, the more of the image it covers, the more difficult it will be for a thief to crop out or try to paint over.

That said, watermarks have two major problems:

It takes a fair amount of time to batch process your images so you can add watermarks.
The images on your portfolio will not look as good as they would without watermarks. Pretty much everyone would rather see an image without a watermark versus one with a watermark. It’s disruptive, which is the point, after all.

Watermarks are not terribly common anymore. If online photo thievery is a concern, however, it is the way to go.

Photography Website Tips and Tricks

Plan Your Layout

Sit down with a piece of paper and figure out how you want your photography website design to look before you start working on a computer. This sketch gives you an idea of what you want your end result to look like.

Think of what colors you want to use and what features you want to have. You can always adjust it later if you have new ideas, come across a better elements on other sites, or find out that something is too difficult to pull off.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important aspect of web design today. Properly done SEO pushes your photography website up the search engine results when someone searches for certain keywords.

SEO is complex, based on algorithms used by search engines to find the most relevant sites and keep scammers from the top listings, but there are a few things you can do without too much work. You should give all the photos you put on your site a name using their alt tags.

This increases the number of keywords found on your website. If you use the site as a blog and post regularly, more people will link to your site and improve your ranking.

Use High Contrast

Use the colors of your photography website to make your photos look better. Most photos look better on black backgrounds. Black backgrounds usually create a higher contrast than a white background would. Contrast will bring out the colors of the photos. The images will appear more vivid. Viewers will get the best possible impression of your work.

For sports, commercial, nature, portrait, or HDR photography website, look at the images on a black background, them look at them on a white background. Figure out which one looks better.

Sites that are designed to be predominantly dark colored should have splashes and flares of color added in. This will give the photography website a distinctive personality. Sites down in purely black and white can still have personality, but it requires a lot more care and consideration.

Only Use High Resolution Photos

If you want potential customers to see your work at its best, only use high resolution images. Full sized images should not be displayed at 300px by 300px. This will make details harder to see and hide just how skilled you are at photography.

Let viewers see your work in all its glory, color, and detail. Don’t shortchange yourself or your viewers by posting images with low quality optimized for bandwidth. That does no one any favors. You’re there to sell your skills as a photographer!

Visitors to your photography website may have to wait a few seconds longer for the images to load, but if they are there to see photos, they will understand. It’s not worth sacrificing a detailed view of your phots for a few moments or seconds of load time. It will not do you any favors.

Use Good Marketing Copy

Choose good marketing copy. It should be easy for visitors to your photography website to learn what you do, what your hours are, where you are located, how to contact you, and what sets you apart from other photographers offering the same services. Without that information easily available, there’s no point to the rest of the photography website design.

Keep text topical. Make sure it matches the page you’re on. A page showing photoshoots of children should have text discussing about how you take photos of children and what kind of packages you offer for those shoots. It’s better to not have any text beyond a header at all than text that is not about the subject of the page.

Make sure your text is properly proofread and edited. Misspellings and grammar mistakes make your business look unprofessional and lazy. The wording should fit the target audience; there’s some call for poetic turns of phrase when talking about wedding photography, but pertinent information should not get buried in it.

Font should be legible. It’s okay to use fancy fonts for titles and page headers. Those are usually short and are meant to instantly grab attention. Smaller, longer liens of text, however, should stick with traditional fonts like Sans Serif or Arial. You also need to make sure the text is not squished together illegibly. There should be a decent amount of spacing between lines and between letters.

Colors should also stand out so the text can be easily readable. Purple on bright blue, for instance, is unreadable. That sort of color choice will drive visitors away. Black on lighter colors and white on dark colors usually works best. Make sure you run your color choices by one or two other people before finalizing them.

Something to keep in mind when building a photography website is that your text and your image should not make each other difficult to see. It’s easy to make it so images block text, or the text describing a gallery interferes with the ability to click on the images. Always preview your website before you update it to help prevent this issue.

Keep up with Current Tech Trends

Take a look at a few professional photography website examples. You’ll notice that they regularly update. Good photography website design changes over time, with either technology, the market, or tastes.

After you build your photography website, look at other sites regularly to see what they are doing. If your photography website is starting to look dated, go ahead and take the time to update it.

It’s always a good idea to optimize your site for mobile use on both smartphones and tablets. People looking for businesses when they are on the go often do so on these devices.

You need to make sure the site is viewable on these devices and that pertinent information about location, hours, and contact info are still easily visible. Galleries tend to have the most trouble with this, but it is definitely worth the time and effort to make sure they look good.

Ending thoughts on designing a photography website

A well-designed photography website will help your business. Customers will find it easier to find you.

Many will learn of you only by finding your website. Take the time to do it right. Put your best foot forward and show off your photography skills. Make sure it’s easy for visitors to contact you and your website can begin helping your business!

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