Anyone who makes a living with a camera needs a portfolio site at some point. After all, with its help, you can show galleries of works in high resolution and attract potential customers. This article will tell you how to make a website for a photographer without knowing the code – just by choosing a powerful website builder. We’ll walk through the basic steps, such as optimizing SEO, setting up a mobile site, and choosing free photography website templates.
How to make a photographer website
- Set clear goals
- Collect the best works
- Choose a layout
- Choose a template
- Add the pages you want
- Connect social media
- Optimize your SEO
- Customize the mobile version
- Ask for feedback
- Update the photographer’s website in time
1. Set clear goals
Before making a website for a photographer, decide on its purpose. This will determine the appearance and the functionality of the site: for example, the presence of specific pages or a form with a subscription to the newsletter. Ask yourself – why do you need a portfolio site? For instance:
- Showcase your best work. If so, your free photography website templates come in handy, including prebuilt image galleries like the Cloud retouch Pro Gallery.
- Increase industry credibility and build a loyal audience. You should add a blog to the site or start a newsletter to do this.
- Attract new customers. In this case, be sure to create a contact page or add a live chat feature.
- Sell prints and other paraphernalia. To do this, you can open an online store and place it in a special section on the site.
2. Collect the best works
A photographer’s website is not an Instagram account, where visitors can endlessly scroll through the photographer’s feed and leave likes. In the case of an online portfolio, you have less than a minute to grab the user’s attention and get them to read on. So choose works you are genuinely proud of, projects you want to show the world. We recommend breaking your work into short galleries – no more than 20-30 photos each. Each gallery should reflect a particular concept or direction of work: for example, “Portraits,” “Wedding photography,” “Nude,” or “Reportage photography.” This will make it easier for visitors to navigate the site, and their attention will not be overwhelmed by a tremendous amount of work.
3. Select a layout
The layout is the visual structure of a site; it determines how the elements are displayed on the page. It is in your best interest to make your photos the center of attention to instantly pique the interest of new visitors.
Suppose there are a few web design tricks to help you do this. First, use a lot of “air” to fill in the gaps between the elements with a white or black background. The background will serve as a frame for each photo and avoid the cluttering of details on the page. Second, consider the format of your photos when choosing a layout. A gallery with “endless” scrolling a la Instagram is suitable for vertical images, where new images will be loaded as you scroll down. For horizontal – classic block layout. For pictures of different formats, you can try an asymmetric design, in which parts of the pages are not equal to each other. This option is also good because it makes the page’s appearance more dynamic.
4. Select a template
Free website templates for photographers are an opportunity to create a beautiful and functional web resource without resorting to the services of web designers. Cloud retouch offers dozens of design templates in a wide variety of categories, such as wedding photographer, family photographer, and food photographer. Each template can be customized to your taste using a convenient visual editor: change the color scheme, font, graphic elements, and much more. Even if you plan to start a website from scratch, photography website templates can be a source of inspiration and exciting solutions for your page.
5. Add the pages you want
Now is the time to think over the site architecture – that is, what pages your portfolio will consist of. As a general rule, photographers do not want complex websites with a lot of pages – however, we advise you to pay attention to the following sections:
Home Page
This is the first thing that a visitor who visits the site will see – so make sure that the home page contains your name, surname, and logo and tells about you and your business in detail and clearly. Photographers often ignore the textual part of the site – and this is a big mistake. Yes, images are the most crucial part of your online portfolio – however, the accompanying text provides the visitor with the necessary context. For example, the introductory text is essential for a landscape photographer. After all, without it, visitors may think that they have come to the website of a travel agency or travel blogger.
Also, include a menu at the top of your site so that users can easily navigate from page to page. Depending on the site’s style, the menu can be a navigation bar in the site header or a hamburger icon that will open when clicked.
Gallery
The gallery is the heart of a photographer’s site, so create it with the utmost care. Adjust the quality and other characteristics of the images to appear exactly as you intended. Choose from ready-made layouts to suit your needs – like a panorama or an Instagram feed-style gallery. In addition, Pro Gallery allows you to protect photos from downloading or sharing them on social networks to attract a new audience. You can also upload videos and text to the gallery to add important context to any project.
About Me Page
Share a little about yourself to create and strengthen an emotional connection between you and your visitors. Share only the essential and exciting details: your philosophy, technique, sources of inspiration, and the most exciting biography details. Tell the story in the first person – this makes the text more personal, and the visitors are more likely to want to know more about you. If you deem it necessary, leave your photo and resume here as well.
Showcasing Clients
Submit photos of the people and brands you’ve worked with on your site – with their permission, of course. A gallery-like is a great way to build credibility and encourage potential customers to collaborate.
Contacts
Make it possible to contact you as quickly and simply as possible – after all, the fate of future orders depends on this. Your email and phone number must be in the site’s footer; however, you can create a separate page with contacts so that visitors will not get lost for sure. For an even better user experience, add a contact form to your page so potential customers can communicate with you directly through the site.
Additional Pages
Depending on the purpose of the site, you may also find the following pages helpful:
- Blog. Share news, projects, opinions about the industry. This will help build your credibility in the photography community and build a loyal community around your site. In addition, it improves SEO, and the site will appear more often in search results.
- Reviews. Create a customer testimonial page to serve as additional advertising for your services.
6.Connect social networks
With 500 million daily users on Instagram alone, social media is the easiest and cheapest way to tell the world about yourself and reach potential customers:
- Include social media icons on your website that lead to profiles with your work.
- Enable the sharing function in Pro Gallery to share photos from the site on their pages and thereby increase your traffic.
- Put the site’s domain name on all social media accounts to redirect leads to your portfolio.
7. Optimize SEO
Search engines don’t recognize images – so you need to add text descriptions to get your site indexed adequately and generate traffic. Add a title and caption to each image in the Cloud retouch Pro Gallery. Don’t try to add unnecessary information or keywords – just briefly describe what exactly is shown in the photo. The photo descriptions will serve as alt-text and help the site appear in Google and Yandex in the “Pictures” section.
8. Configure the mobile version
In 2020, more than half of the traffic came from mobile devices. Therefore, in addition to making a photographer’s website, you need to make sure that it displays correctly on smartphones and tablets.
Some work is already done for you: Cloud retouch Pro Gallery automatically adjusts images to fit different screen sizes. You can customize the rest in Cloud retouch’s visual editor: enlarge some elements and delete others with a few mouse clicks.
9. Ask for feedback
Before publishing a photographer’s site, ask friends and family to check it out. An outsider’s perspective will help you optimize navigation, fix design flaws, and spot trivial typos in the text.
10.Update the photographer’s website in time
Nobody likes sites that haven’t been updated for a long time. Therefore, even when you are not looking for new clients, do not forget to add something new to the site. This could be information about an upcoming project, a blog article, new prints for sale, or even a built-in Instagram feed that will automatically pull your photos from social networks to the page.
