The Most Appealing Aspects of Successful Photography Websites

Your photography website is the face of your company; it's the first point of contact for potential customers or fans. Even if each photographer has a different vision for his or her website, certain information should still be present.

Presentation is everything when it comes to portfolios. Great photography websites are more likely to be found. Getting noticed means attracting customers, which means money. This is why it's important to devote a lot of time and effort to your photography portfolio websites.

A photography website builder is an excellent way to easily make your photo gallery accessible to prospective clients. You can use this forum to build an online space where you can showcase your best photography techniques. The best part is that you don't need any programming or web design experience to get started. To get you started, the site builder will provide you with photography website templates.

Here is a list of 15 essential photography ideas for your inspiration to help you move forward with your photography business goals and build an enticing website. They apply if you're just starting out as a photographer and need some advice or simply need to update your photography websites.

The Best Features of Photography Websites

• Simplicity is the Key

Successful photographers have recognized the importance of simplicity, concentrating on the basics and eliminating the unnecessary. So, even though your site has a lot of content, you should try to arrange it in a straightforward way so that people don't get confused and leave. Simplicity allows you to focus on the important stuff while still providing a great browsing experience for your visitors.

Adam Bird photography portfolio websites

Image is taken from Adam Bird Photography

• Clear Navigation

Photographers are often excessively concerned with the site's visual elements, to the detriment of its usability. 83 percent of tourists abandon a website because getting to what they want requires so many clicks; that's a big amount!

Visitors should be able to access the web with ease, so here are some best practices to follow:

Keep the number of menu items to a bare minimum (ideally 5 or 6)
The menu should be placed on the top or left side of the page
Throughout the web, the menu should be in the same place.
A simple way to return to the homepage should always be available.

• A Contact Page That Works

It's important to have easy access to your contact details.

Make the contact information as available as possible (including in the footer of each page) and keep the contact form as simple as possible.

• Blogging

A photography blog on your website allows you to showcase your best work on a regular basis, advertise your services, and/or market your prints and merchandise. Blogs have a lot of SEO advantages, but they also help you interact with your audience on a more personal level. Visitors will trust your website more and return for updates if you regularly publish new articles and glimpses into your latest photography ventures. And Google will soon follow suit.

• Analyzing Data

You can't change anything you can't track!

There isn't a single top photographer who doesn't use analytics tools to monitor traffic to their photography websites (with Google Analytics being the popular option of course).

However, you must go a step further: it is not just about obtaining traffic statistics. You must also view them and make educated decisions on how to make things better:

Have you noticed that your bounce rate is too high? Make sure your main pages have straightforward calls to action and that your navigation is easy to use.
Have you noticed an increase in traffic on those days? Determine the source of that traffic or attempt to duplicate that form of content.
Are you aware that people are searching for images on your site? Keep track of internal image searches so you can add/promote more of the same in the future.
Do you want to make your website more optimized? Learn as much as you can about your target audience's demographics so that you can properly adapt your site's content to them.

• A Great “About” Page

The Bio page is crucial because it is often the second most visited page on photography websites. Successful photographers have learned to pay close attention to this page and to write a profile that is both straightforward and concise. Although it seems easy at first glance, writing anything about yourself can be difficult, particularly when it comes to deciding what other elements to include on the page and how to optimize it.

Image is taken from Alex Julia Photo

• A Well-Tailored Theme

Something distinctive is required to create a strong brand identity for your photography company. You must make an effort to stand out in today's sea of amateur photography websites. This can be accomplished by gaining a deeper understanding of your target audience and tailoring your message to them. It does, however, have design consequences. If visitors to your site think, "Blah, I've seen this before!" regardless of what you've posted, you've already made a poor first impression!

• Reliability and Speed

The consistency of their hosting company is a popular issue for photographers. The website is either slow to load (despite numerous performance improvements) or suffers from regular server hiccups (which prevent visitors from accessing the site for a few minutes/hours).

Many popular photographers have realized the importance of having a quick and error-free website. Working on-site results, investing in a quality hosting service, testing and repairing any broken links, and conducting small experiments on a regular basis are all examples of this.

• Excellent SEO

On-site and off-site SEO is essential to successful website owners.

The on-site information (title and meta description tags, headers, image captions, and keywords, among other things) must be in perfect working order for Google to properly index the site and assign meaning to its rankings based on the relevant content/keywords on the website.

Off-site SEO is a long-term technique that entails getting other photography websites to connect back to your site (preferably with good “anchor texts”). If you don't have a backlink strategy in place (e.g., linking to your site from social media and group accounts, blogging about your website, getting other people to blog about you, etc. ), you won't have any luck with search engines and, as a result, won't get many visitors.

Consider each connection as a recommendation for your content. The more connections you have, the more likely you are to be considered a legitimate search result by the search engines.

• Full of Personality

It's almost difficult to stand out solely by SEO tactics. Trust is the name of the game in today's world. Adding personality to your website is as simple as using natural language and showing glimpses into your life. Your photography About page is obviously a fantastic place to express yourself.

Image is taken from Ariana Jordan

• Prioritizing Quality Over Quantity

Only their best work is shown by successful photographers. When visitors arrive at your website, you only get one chance to make a good first impression, so make it count.

Filling whole pages on your photography websites with galleries and photographs isn't going to help you get very far. If you want to be at the top of your game, you'll need to master content curation. That means letting go of mediocre content and focusing solely on your best photographs (even if you think there aren't enough to make a difference).

You should trim down the content as much as possible and only promote the parts of it that you are proud of. Filling in gaps (with "normal" content) isn't anything you can do just for the sake of it. So keep track of how many pictures you have in your slideshows and how many featured galleries you have on your homepage, and just promote your best work.

• Consistency and Freshness

Since they're popular and have the time/money/connections/opportunities, top photographers continue to add high-quality content (photo galleries, articles) to their photography websites on a regular basis. However, the opposite is also true: they are popular because they continue to add material.

Even if you don't have some recent new content (perhaps you haven't done a photo project in a while), at the very least rotate some of your homepage content to keep it looking fresh. There's nothing wrong with sometimes repurposing some of your older material.

• Mobile-Friendly Design

These days, mobile browsing is so common that you can't ignore it. In reality, Google now considers mobile-friendliness to be a significant ranking factor.

That means you shouldn't make smartphone users pinch-and-zoom to access your web. That's where responsive design comes in, enabling the site's content to adjust to every screen size, resulting in a much better browsing experience.

This is even more important for photography websites because users need to connect with the site more (to change slideshow images and to purchase images ) Great photography websites are adept at handling this, resizing images and content as required.

• The Use of Social Media

Have you ever seen a top photographer who isn't using social media to grow his or her business?

To begin, let's define the difference between share/like buttons and profile links. Everyone has a share button (to provide "social evidence" and/or encourage visitors to share the site on their own profiles).

Instead, the profile links will take you to your own social media accounts. These serve as "outposts" outside of your web, assisting you in spreading the word across the internet. All popular photographers have undoubtedly discovered this to be extremely beneficial, and they are devoting time, effort, and sometimes even money to increasing their social media followers.

• E-mail Newsletter

Email marketing is used by almost all prominent photographers because it is one of the most effective ways to create trust and deliver content to their followers.

However, this is more difficult to develop than a social media following because it necessitates daily posting and delivering value to the subscribers on a regular basis. Even if the amount of subscribers is much smaller than the number of Facebook likes or Twitter followers, the "audience" is much more targeted: these are people who want to subscribe because they like what you do and want to see more of it.