How to design and build your own photography website

February 3, 2016Photo Plus

Learn how easy it can be to create your own online photography portal from start to finish, as Peter Travels explains how to design and build a website for your photography.

Whether you’re an amateur just wanting a photography site to show off your portfolio to family and friends, or you’re a semi-pro or full-time pro photographer who needs an all-encompassing site as a sales device for clients to view and buy your work, a decent website is essential if you want your images to seen at their best.

But where do you start? In this article I’ll take you through the process from start to finish, helping you to avoid potential pitfalls, and hopefully you’ll end up with a photography website you’re proud to share.

As editor of PhotoPlus: The Canon Magazine, I’ve looked at thousands of photographer’s websites over the years.

Some of them are great, their photos look brilliant and work well as a specialised portfolio, it’s easy to find your way around, it’s quick to load, some are overly clever with fancy pop-up galleries, and others are harder to navigate than downtown Deli, with random portfolios showing too many different photographic subjects and styles, others showing a low standard of photos of their cat and dog.

I knew when I was building my photography website I wanted it to be clean and simple, easy to navigate – and also easy to design, populate and update. Which is why I chose UK-based Pixelrights. They offer contemporary website templates designed by photographers for photographers, it’s a joy to use, and at an affordable price. Plus you can join for free too.

Other website builders I considered were Squarespace and Prophoto, but I prefered Pixelrights’ design, and as I discovered – their ‘dashboard’ is very simple and fast to use when designing and updating your site.

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Domain name & hosting
Right at the start you’ll also need to pick and pay for a domain name and web host (where your site lives on the internet) for your site. I used 123-reg.co.uk, but there are tons of others web hosting companies, such as Fasthosts and 1&1 Internet. I already had the domain name www.petertravers.co.uk registered, try choosing your name or company name, or close to it – think obvious, not ambiguous.

Armed with my domain name, then it was just a case of redirecting the domain name to the Pixelrights server via the ‘Managing DNS’ in my 123-reg Control Panel. It’s quite technical doing these backend setups, and all too easy to mess it up, so ask your website company or domain name provider for assistance. Pixelrights will soon be offering domain name and web hosting too.

The big benefit of web hosting companies is the ability to design your own site, instead of paying a web designer vast amounts to design your site – then paying them every time you need something changed or improved.

I’m no designer – although I know my way around magazine design – but found with the dashboard and templates I could design my own website and look, using the templates as a starting point, then tweaking the layout to suit my needs.

It also meant I didn’t need to bother with WordPress, like other website builders, which I’ve found confusing and time-consuming to use.

Website design template
I was struggling to pick a website design template as I didn’t really like some of the photographic styles on some of the templates, so I couldn’t really picture how it would look for me and my photography.

So I highly recommend starting the free trials with your chosen template, and uploading 20-30 of your own images right at the start to see how it looks then. It’s the best way to visualize how your site could look, and if you like the layout, when it’s populated with your own pictures.

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Design dashboard
From the ‘dashboard’ I’m able to access the main areas of my website’s design. ‘Photos’ is where the albums are, under ‘Design’ I can instantly change the Homepage look, and the look of all other pages, as well as amend menu titles, and how many menus, plus colours and fonts (see below). I can edit each individual album, picking which images should be the album covers and so on. Adding and editing text in my INFO and PRICING menus is easy too.

Font of all knowledge
Font choice can certainly play a part in the look of your site, and fonts which were fashionable one year aren’t the next, so choose wisely. I knew I wanted a classy serif font for my main titles and menus, all in capitals. If you’re, for instance, a garden photographer, you might want a softer look such as flowery script in lowercase.

The colour of your site also plays a big part in the look and feel. I went for white as I feel photos stand out better, and it’s brighter and less foreboding compared to black or dark coloured site, but a colourful site my site you and your ‘branding’ better.

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What’s on the menu?
Many sites have drop-down menus – so you click on, say, PORTFOLIO, then you have several choices in a drop-down list to click on. What I like about the Pixelrights design is that when you click on GALLERIES (as I’ve called it on my site) you’re taken to page with all your different photo albums.

This makes so much sense to me – as it’s a photo website it makes it much nicer to have photos to choose from and click on, rather than words in a list. It’s also a great way to show off different photographic portfolios. You then hover over images to reveal the gallery category.

Specialise for success
Specialising is the key to success with photography. You can’t be a master of all photography trades, nobody can. Plus nobody wants a do-it-all photographer. People want experts in their field so they can trust them. You need to specialize in one area. So do what you’re good at and what you enjoy.

My website is dedicated to my new part-time freelance venture, as a contemporary portrait photographer, so I need my portfolio and galleries to reflect this. It’s tough narrowing down and selecting what-to-feel-are-your-best shots for your site, but it’s got to be done if you want to be taken seriously.

Picking and preparing photos 
There’s also nothing worse than a photo website overwhelmed with every type of photography. As well as confusing to digest, it’s also the fastest way to dilute your standards. It’s far better to have a site with only ten really strong images, than 50 weak images.

It also only takes one weak image in a gallery for people to question your standards. Be ruthless in your image selection, and ask for honest feedback from fellow photographers – don’t ask friends or family as they’ll be too kind.

You can always amend and improve your galleries as you go, but start with the strongest possible selection as you build up your portfolio.

Resize your images for the web
Resize your JPG images in Photoshop to make it a) quicker to upload to your site, and b) quicker for people to view online. Although most websites are very clever and optimise images for web viewing anyway. I set up a quick Action for vertical and horizontal images so images were always at least 2000 pixels on their longest side. In Photoshop Elements there’s a ‘Save For Web’ option which can be handy.

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Drag and drop images
Many companies now enable you to drag and drop images from folders straight into the dashboard, making it really quick to update. You can then re-order and re-name images, move image to different galleries, and also quickly adjust each galleries layout – I used a different ‘Masonary’ gallery for family portraits compared to corporate headshots, for instance, and then a ‘Photoblog’ gallery design for the content I post under the ‘New’ menu.

What about me?
People need to know who you are, what sort of photography you offer, and why you’re qualified to be a X, Y or Z photographer, so ensure you have an ABOUT ME or similar page with a brief biography and relevant career highlights. My brief I mean less than 100 words – there’s nothing worse than 500 words of badly written waffle telling people your life story, and how you used to take photos with a toy camera when you were 4 years old.

This is a good place for your contact details too. You might prefer to add a Contact Form for people to fill in and contact you – this will combat spam web-bots finding your email address and sending you junk mail – but I think most people prefer an email addresses as a point of contact, and option to telephone you too.

If you’ve been published, mention it here, and including magazine, book or website details.

Setting up your shop window
You should see your website as your shop window for potential customers. So as well as attracting people with your stunning photos, backed up with solid credentials, you may also need to consider including other relevant info like your photography day rate or pricing structure for prints, framed prints and canvas.

Image protection and watermarks
The internet is a prime place too, unfortunately, for people to steal your photos and to use them for free, or worse, pass them off as their own. Thankfully under the Security section of the dashboard I was able to add watermarks to all my images (with options on how this appears on your pictures), helping you stop people taking ‘screen shot’ of your images.

There is also a free image tracking service with www.imagerights.com, which tracks every image uploaded on your Pixelrights’ site to see where else they’re being used on the internet.

Private galleries & printing for clients
Many pro photographers need a way to display private online galleries to customer. I need this to show people their processed portrait photos, giving them a way to select images they would like, which I can then offer as a digital image and/or print, each at an extra cost.

Pixelrights doesn’t (currently at least) offer direct link ups with pro print labs – however you can add links to external sites and offer fully automated print services with companies like ShootProof or SmugMug both of which, as well as offering ways to display online galleries to people, are fully integrated with many leading print labs so your customers can place orders directly. They take a cut, of course, but it means you can concentrate on taking photos instead.

You can add ecommerce shopping sections to your site, if you’re planning to sell prints you’re creating on a home printer, and/or as framed prints, for instance. If you’re selling items directly from your site, offering direct payments systems like PayPal to accept card payments will suit most customers.

Mobile and tablet-friendly site
Pixelright’s design is fully mobile and tablet-friendly, so when people view my site on their iPad or tablet, the design adapts whether viewed in landscape or portrait. On an iPhone or smartphone, the design gets stripped right back to make it easier to view images and access menus.

As most people look on the web on their tablets and phones these days, it’s essential your site has this adaptability. If you don’t people are likely to get frustrated or will give up trying to zoom in to read your site.

Social media butterfly
Every modern photographer worth their salt has social media pages that they keep up to date and constantly post new images – it’s a brilliant marketing tool. I’m fairly busy on Facebook and Twitter, I’m using Instagram more now, and trying to do more Pinterest too. My platform offers built-in icons for social media, so I have links at the bottom of each web page to my four main social media pages.

Get blogging
Posting new content (words and pictures) is one of the best ways to help improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) rankings – how high you rank when people search for your/your site in search engines like Google. A blog or new work section is ideal as it’s a place you can quickly post new photos throughout the month. Also include links to other websites as Google’s SEO likes this too.

Work in progress…
It can take weeks or months to design your website, depending on how complex and how many images you need to post, and how complex. Even when it’s ‘finished’ and you’ve made it live for the world to see – you’ll always need to update it constantly to keep your photos looking fresh, and to tweak and polish the design.

There’s always room for improvement on every website. Good luck!

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