How to Create a Photographer Website

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

1. Set clear goals
2. Collect the best works
3. Choose a layout
4. Choose a template
5. Add the pages you want
6. Connect social media
7. Optimize your SEO 
8. Customize the mobile version
9. Ask for feedback
10. 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 certain 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 Cloudretouch 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 truly 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 certain 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 huge 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 elements 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 photos, where new photos will be loaded as you scroll down. For horizontal – classic block layout. For photos of different formats, you can try an asymmetric layout, 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. Cloudretouch offers dozens of design templates in a wide variety of categories, such as wedding photographers, family photographers, and food photographers. 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’re planning to start a website from scratch, photography website templates can be a source of inspiration and interesting solutions for your page.

How to create a photographer website: choose a template for a photographer website how to create a photographer website: choose a template for a photographer website

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. Often photographers ignore the textual part of the site – and this is a big mistake. Yes, images are the most important part of your online portfolio – however, the accompanying text provides the visitor with the necessary context. For example, the introductory text is very important 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.

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Gallery 

The gallery is the heart of a photographer’s site, so create it with the utmost care. Our users can take advantage of the Cloudretouch Pro Gallery, an application that allows you to create and manage high-quality photo galleries with ease. 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 important and interesting details: your philosophy, technique, sources of inspiration, and the most interesting 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. 

Cloudretouch Photo Albums make it easy to organize your customer gallery. Create a separate album for each customer, choose the appropriate layout and add explanatory captions to the photos.

how to create a photographer website: photo albums on the website how to create a photographer website: photo albums on the website

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.

Another good idea is to integrate it into your Cloudretouch Bookings page. It is a booking management platform that makes life easier for thousands of small business owners. With it, you can add a calendar to your contacts page that shows free filming dates. What’s more, visitors can immediately book a date and pay online. This saves time for you and your customers and eliminates unnecessary calls and emails.

Additional Pages 

Depending on the purpose of the site, you may also find the following pages useful:

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.

Internet shop. Sell ​​photos directly through the site using the Cloudretouch Art Store app. It lets you sell digital and physical copies of images, watermark them, create custom licenses for use, and more.

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:

1. Include social media icons on your website that lead to profiles with your work.
2. Enable the sharing function in Pro Gallery to share photos from the site on their pages and thereby increase your traffic.
3. 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 properly and generate traffic. Add a title and description to each image in the Cloudretouch 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.

How to Create a Photographer Website: Optimize SEOHow to Create a Photographer Website: Optimize SEO

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: Cloudretouch Pro Gallery automatically adjusts images to fit different screen sizes. In Cloudretouch’s visual editor, you can customize the rest: enlarge some elements and delete others with a few mouse clicks.

how to create a photographer website: set up a mobile version how to create a photographer website: set up a mobile version

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.

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