Pixiq

The most important marketing tool for any photographer is a website. Whether you are a professional or an amateur, creating a website to display your images is a great way to show your work. For the pro, a website is home base for every other form of marketing because all promotional materials will reference the website. A website is a requirement for any professional photographer seeking assignment work. I cannot stress enough how important a high quality, well designed, easy to navigate, professional website is in this digital age.

From my conversations with photo editors, I know that a photographer’s website needs to show the images as large as possible, load quickly, and be straightforward. You don’t need a thirty-second snazzy flash introduction—that will only annoy a busy photo editor. In fact, statistics show that you have roughly seven seconds to get their attention. Another recent statistic I have heard is that if your first five images don’t impress the viewer, they won’t stick around to see any others. Very few photo editors will comb through your entire site; they simply don’t have time. Because of this, I would suggest naming the links to your individual portfolio galleries according to the type of images in that gallery, e.g., adventure or action for the sports images, people or portraits for your portraiture, and so on. That way, when a photo buyer comes to your website they can go directly to the type of images they are looking for.

The appearance of your website is also critical. While photo editors are looking mostly at your images, if the design of the website is poor, it will affect the perception of your images. I would recommend a clean and uncluttered look that puts the focus on the images. Make sure you have links for a bio, contact information, and your portfolios at a minimum, and that these links are easily visible and in the same location on every page on the website. For your portfolio galleries, remember that you want to look professional. You don’t want your portfolio links to send the viewer to a Flickr page with a grid of images, nor do you want them to be cookie cutter web galleries generated by Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, or Aperture. The web galleries should fit in stylistically with the rest of the website. On a technical note, since the web is an sRGB color space, you’ll want to make sure to convert your images to sRGB. And you’ll also want to make sure your images appear sharp on your web page.

So how do you go about building a solid, professional website? If you have the skills, you can design and build it yourself. Another option is to hire a web designer to build a custom website for you. The advantage of this approach is that your website will be completely unique. The downside is, in most cases, this is a very expensive option. An easier option is to work with a website company like Livebooks (www.livebooks.com) or A Photo Folio (www.aphotofolio.com). Both of these companies, and many more like them, offer excellent template websites that are customizable to some degree. I would highly recommend both of these options for photographers that aren’t knowledgeable about website design. These sites make it very easy to swap out images, they deal with the search engine optimization process for you, and they are very inexpensive compared to having a web designer build your site from scratch. Last but not least, most photo buyers seem to like the basic design of these templates. As an example, my current website was built with an APhotoFolio template and it won an award in the 2011 PDN Photo Annual in the best new website category. Hence, the templates are able to produce excellent websites. You can check out my website at www.michaelclarkphoto.com. 

Once you have decided on a website template or design, you will have to put together your web galleries. Just as with a print portfolio, you’ll want to include only your best work and nothing more. Again, this is where you want to take a long look at your work and choose images that reinforce the type of imagery you want to produce for clients. Be aware that you may have sentimental feelings about some images, which will cloud your judgment as to what is your best work. If possible, I would highly recommend that you have a photo editor look at a select group of your images and help narrow it down to the best of the best.

Once your website is a reality, you’ll want to work on Search Engine Optimization (or SEO for short). Why is this important? If you want someone to be able to find you via Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine, then your site will have to be built with an eye towards SEO. We can’t get into all of the specifics here, but SEO is based on many factors, including searchable keywords that describe the content of your website. For my website, I didn’t choose keywords that focus on my name or the name of my website. I instead choose keywords that describe the types of images I produce so that when a photo buyer is looking for that type of photography, my website comes up in the first few listings on Google. This is a huge consideration because there are thousands of photo buyers out there that don’t know your name, but they might know they need images from an “adventure sports photographer.” And if you happen to come up in the first four or five search results, the odds are much better that they will look at your work. Since it isn’t possible to have your website dialed in for every possible search word someone might think up, you’ll have to consider your the type of work you produce and determine which keywords best represent your work.