Joe giacomet
Joe shares his experiences of building an online showcase for your photos
What do you need from a website to communicate your message effectively to clients?
A photographer’s website should be clean, simple and stripped back to the bare essentials. When an art buyer views my website, I want them to be able to navigate and browse my portfolio within seconds, as often this is all they have. Slow loading
times, gimmicky navigation and confusing symbols are all a no-no. The photos have to look great too, otherwise it’s a waste of time.
How do you make your website memorable and easy to navigate?
People need to visit your site and remember you for your images, not your website. I think if your site is memorable, it’s probably gimmicky, and that doesn’t appeal to me. My agent’s site, for example, www.
markgeorge.com, is so simple – but it’s great because it shows the images as big as physically possible for the screen you’re using.
Navigation is really crucial. I’ve been on so many photographers’ websites which have ‘cool’ navigation, and it just annoys me.
How important is having a blog on your site?
An interesting blog keeps it fresh and active. You can show your personality and tell the story of your work. Will a blog get you work? Probably not. However, it’s good to look busy, and a blog helps with this.
How much of your work comes directly from your website visits?
Not a lot. However, I landed Shell as a client earlier this year totally through my website. The photo buyer at Shell found my website online and got in touch directly.
I have also had people come up to me who have seen my work on my website, but to be honest it’s more other photographers, stylists or photo assistants rather than clients themselves. But this is specific to my area of work: for photographers in other genres, I imagine their site will generate a greater proportion of direct business.
People will hear about me, then check out my website. A lot of my other work comes from face-to-face meetings or via my agent. But ultimately all my networking and agents do is get me on photography buyers’ lists. When they’ve got a job, they then go and take a look at my site and see if my work is suitable for the job they have in mind. So my website gets me work indirectly.
What are the most important features to have on a website?
I think the most important feature is having your work take the hero position. Nice, big, clear pictures. You don’t want to add so many features that your work takes second place. Although saying that, one feature I think is important is the ability for people to save off individual images. When an art buyer or art director is pitching, they want to grab your pics to place them into their pitch documents easily. Sometimes they might request this, but more often than not they’ll just grab them from your site. When I had a Flash-based website years ago, a few people moaned to me about it being difficult to take pictures off.
The flip side of this, of course, is that would-be copyright infringers can also take your pics. However, I think if people want to do this, there’s little you can do to stop them, bar watermarking – which I hate.
“I think the most important feature of a photography website is having your work take the hero position”
Joe Giacomet