Get a Professional Photographer’s Website

When you look at the billions of photographs on the Internet, how do your photographs stand out from the rest? How do you get taken seriously as a professional, and not just another hobby photographer? Using a freebie website or a standard template is just not good enough! Professional photographers need professional portfolios.

Your professional website is not only your online portfolio, but it’s also the best agent you’ll ever have. It works for you 24×7x365 (even while you’re sleeping and on holiday) and it doesn’t ask for commission!

When you take a photograph:

• you are capturing your unique perspective on the world
• you immortalise an emotion, moment or mood
• it is the culmination of your patience, technical ability, and having a good eye
• you’re lucky to be in the right place at the right time

Let your photographs be presented in the best possible way, so that they can turn you into a well-paid photographer. To reflect your work properly, your website must be tailor-made to let your personality shine through.

Take a look at our special offer and contact us today for your online portfolio & agent! Feel free to ask for a no-obligation quote to design your professional portfolio with a few extras, like an online store.

Below are some tips and extra information that are pertinent to photography websites. There are also a few thumbnails to show you how the photo gallery works. The watermark can be added yourself or by the gallery. As can be seen in these examples, the watermark has been added twice for extra effect. That is optional

 

What will your website look like?

Firstly, it must reflect you and your work. We work closely with our clients to ensure they are totally delighted with the look and feel of their website.

Colours - I don’t need to tell you that you’re good with colours … so you’re very welcome to give us your preferred colours for the fonts, menu, content and background using their HEX or RGB values.

Fonts - there are very few fonts that are available on every pc in the world, which means that your favourite font might not be available to the person looking at your photographs. To make sure that viewers see your website as intended, we use standard fonts for the all-important content and can make little graphics for extra effect with your preferred fonts.

How many pages should your website have?

There are two pages that are essential. Your biography, with contact details, and an overview of your work. How many other pages you add, depends on you. We’ll start you off with a photo gallery and album pages, after which you can easily upload photos and add captions yourself. Not sure how? Don’t worry, our clients have exclusive access to the training section which includes how to add/delete photographs and their captions.

Stepping into the Professional Market? You could let people download free digital postcards or computer backgrounds that show your name and URL as a cost-effective way of building up your professional reputation.

Choosing your domain name

Normally we’d recommend that people choose a domain name that describes what the website is offering. For example, toursandtales.com clearly tells people that the website is about Tours and Tales, and suggests that it’s about travel and writing.

However, because photographers “are the product”, you need to register your name as the domain name. If your target audience lives in your country, then choosing a domain name with your country’s extension (e.g. co.uk or .nl) is a good idea. If your market is world-wide, then it’s also a good idea to register a .com version of your name too. It’s not necessary to have two websites, as one domain can be forwarded to the other.

Can you stop people from stealing your photographs?

Although photographs are protected by copyright, it’s likely that you won’t know when, where or how someone is using one of your photos. And the Internet is not geared up for protecting intellectual property, just ask any artist, musician, director …

Sadly, if you upload something onto the Internet, it will probably be used or copied in some way. There are a few measures that can be taken on a website, but these are not fool-proof. There are only two real ways of keeping control of your copyright. An expensive option is to watermark each photograph with Digimarc, which also keeps track of the places where the photo gets used; and the other option (although it isn’t really an optoin) is to NOT put it onto the Internet in the first place.