SIX OF THE BEST PHOTO WEBSITE BUILDERS
Tools to help you create your own portfolio or online store
1 Squarespace From £10 a month, £90 a year
Squarespace is one of the slickest website builders out there. Some website-building editors can be cumbersome, but the Squarespace editor is among the most intuitive we’ve used. With an array of beautiful templates to choose from and all kinds of extra features, Squarespace offers a slick package that will suit the needs of most photographers. Many of the templates are based around hero images and stand-out photos – ideal if you want to let your photos do the talking. www.squarespace.com
2 Weebly Free, or from £48 a year
If you want a cost-effective way to get started with website building, Weebly has a generous free package and reasonably priced plans. The editor is easy to use – simply drag content from the sidebar into your chosen template – but it lacks some of the customisation features found in editors like Wix. Weebly is a strong choice when it comes to ecommerce (it offers a separate editor for ecommerce sites), so it could be ideal if your plan is to sell lots of different products. www.weebly.com
3 Wix Free, or from £3 a month
One of the biggest names in website building offers one of the best editors. You can move content anywhere on the page so you have complete control over the layout, which can be crucial when you need photos and text to fit together neatly. As such, it’s not the easiest to use, but it offers a level of control that goes beyond most editors.
Wix’s library of templates is impressive, too, with over 500 to choose from – many of which have been specifically designed for photography businesses.
If it sounds like too much work for you, Wix also offers an artificial intelligence builder. Answer a series of questions, and the Wix Artificial
Design Intelligence system will build a custom site for you. Once it’s done, you can tweak the results to suit your needs. You can always switch from the AI editor to the standard editor to finish the site off, so it can be a useful way to get the ball rolling, especially if you want to add features like ecommerce.
There’s also a free plan (it comes with ads and you can’t customise the domain name), plus hundreds of add-ons ‘apps’ to choose from, including a booking section and a storefront for selling prints. www.wix.com
RIGHT: Wix offers over 500 page templates and a variety of add-on tools to personalise your site.