Turning Pro
Build an online showcase
Launching a website to present your photography is a fantastic way to share your favourite images – but it can also be one of the best ways to gain
paid work as a photographer. While not every websites will directly generate commissions, many jobbing pros find their websites help them get work. Someone may remember an image you shared; a satisfied customer might forward a link to your page; or someone with very specific image needs might search for ‘weasel riding a woodpecker’ and stumble across your image!
One of the best things about launching a photo website these days is that you can do create the whole thing for free. That said, if you’re willing to part with a little bit of cash, you can get yourself a very professional-looking website with bags of functionality. So what should you pay for? Let’s take a look…
Your domain name
Most free website platforms will include the name of the provider in the standard address. For instance, you might have
myphotography.wordpress.com as your address. There’s nothing wrong with that – but having a personalised domain name is easier for people to remember and looks more professional if you’re directing potential clients to your site. Depending on the domain name you want, you can buy one for just a few pounds per year.
Most photographers opt to use their own name as their website’s domain name because it’s easy to remember. One thing to avoid is hyphens in your domain name (eg my-photography-site.com), as these can easily be forgotten. If you can, try to get hold of a .co.uk or .com address, as these are the most widely recognised. Alternatives include .net, .org or .me.
Your publishing platform
There are a number of website publishing systems out there – but if we’re being frank, WordPress is the most popular. It’s even the platform for our own website, digitalcameraworld.com!
WordPress offers plenty of customisable themes to choose from, many of which are available for free. What’s more, all wordpress.com sites come with a generous 3GB worth of free storage. This should be plenty of space to upload your photos, provided you resize your images for the web.
Added benefits include linking your site to your social networking pages, so that every new post on your website gets automatically shared to social media once it goes live. Plus, there’s lots to appeal to photographers, such as
Before you upload any images to your new photography website, it’s a good idea to go through a few simple steps to protect them
gallery formats and slideshows. Many WordPress themes also look great on mobile phones without any effort.
Of course, there are some restrictions to this free blogging platform. You might find you need more than 3GB of storage. You might want custom designs or premium themes. All of these restrictions can be lifted by chargeable upgrades at modest costs.
The most important upgrade you’ll likely want to do is pay for the domain name, as we described earlier. Free websites always have a .wordpress.com (or .blogspot or .wix, depending on the provider) in the address – eg yoursite.
wordpress.com – but this can be removed via a premium upgrade.
Protect your photos online
Before you upload any images to your new photography website, it’s a good idea to go through a few simple steps to protect them from would-be internet thieves. First and foremost is to resize them to a lower resolution. For starters, this will help maximise that 3GB of free storage space we mentioned and make your site load faster. In addition to this, reducing the resolution of your images makes them less appealing to thieves who may want to download them and try to sell them as their own work.
For most photography websites, images don’t need to be any wider than 1,000 pixels. You’ll also want to change the resolution to 72dpi, since an onscreen display doesn’t need as many dots as a print.
Finally, when you save your file, it’s a good idea to give it a more distinctive name than the default file name that was generated by your camera. Using a descriptive name such as “Scotland-landscapes-001” works well. This not only helps you stay organised, but adding keywords to the file names of your images assists search engines like Google to discover your website when people are searching for specifics.