Set up an online portfolio
Having an online presence is essential for promoting your work – let’s explore the options
Getting your images online is the best way to get your work noticed, gain new clients and even sell prints to customers that you could never reach in any other way.
The Internet gives you the chance to showcase your work in a way that’s accessible to people around the world, not just on your doorstep, and even to be found by magazines and professional picture editors. Of course, the web can be a big, confusing place where it’s hard to get noticed amid the sea of images already available, and you may also be worried about the possibility of image theft if you display your best shots publicly.
So, in this instalment we take a look at how to get your shots online, how to protect them, and how to get people to find them using everything from a personal website to social networking. Photo-sharing sites If you want to get your images online without the hassle and expense of setting up your own website, then the simplest way is to use a photo-sharing site such as Flickr, 500px or Pinterest. These offer a great way to get your images on the web, and are usually free to use. They are particularly good if you are prepared to put in some time and effort to join groups and communities on the site, which will help gain your images more views and exposure. They are also perfect for linking to social media, such as Facebook or Twitter, which can improve the exposure of your images to as many people as possible. Website options While photo-sharing websites are great for getting your images online, having your own website can be a more versatile and productive way of selling your images and services, and can also look much more professional. There are several ways of producing a website, from building it yourself to using one of the many all-in-one photography website providers such as Clikpic, Smugmug, Zenfolio or Photium.
If you are ‘tech-savvy’ and want a bespoke site, then it’s not difficult to build your own website. To start with, you’ll need a web hosting service, along with a domain name, which you may need to buy and register separately, although often this can be done through the web hosting company. Once you have this set up you can start to build the actual site using a platform such as Wordpress or Joomla.
The all-in-one providers offer a simpler solution than building your own site as you don’t have to design the site from scratch or worry about separate hosting, as this is part of the package. You can either use an existing domain name or purchase one through the website provider. Then all you need to do is select a template from their site, upload your images and add a few words. This option may cost a little more than building your own site, and may not offer quite as many custom options, but it’s much more convenient if you don’t have the time, knowledge or interest in designing your own site.
Many of these providers also offer a bespoke service, where you can have a website built to your own design without having to do it yourself. This option costs more than the others, but will give your website a unique appearance and design. Basic design Whether you build it yourself or use a template, you should generally try to keep the design and layout of your website simple, clean and uncluttered. If you are simply
showcasing your images this is extremely important, as you don’t want anything to take attention away from these, but being easy to navigate and clearly laid out is advantageous to any website.
An additional advantage of simplicity is that a streamlined design can also make your site easier to use on the smaller screens of phones and tablets, which is becoming more important as more and more people access the web on these devices. To boost this further, you should also look for templates and designs that are ‘mobile friendly’, which means that logos, text boxes, buttons and images are resized for these smaller screens.
Along with coming up with a design you’re happy with, make sure that there is plenty of information about you and the photographic services that you offer. This is particularly important if you are trying to promote an offline photographic business, but even if you only want to sell prints online, people are more likely to trust you enough to buy prints if they can find out some information about you and your photography. Preparing your images With any photography website, the images are the key to its success, so you need to make sure that you resize, sharpen and save the ones you’ve chosen for your portfolio so that they look their best on screen. They also need to be small enough to load quickly on your site, because users aren’t going to wait ages for photos to become visible. You can do this using the normal resizing and save options, but both Photoshop CC and Elements include a handy ‘Save for web’ option in the File menu, which allows you to preview the effects of the different sizing and JPEG compression options before you save the image. This can help you to achieve the best balance between file size and image quality without having to guess what settings to use with the normal save options. Image theft The theft of images online is an ever-present threat to the income and artistic integrity of photographers, so you should take some basic precautions to avoid your images being used without your permission by other sites.
While photo-sharing websites are great for getting your images online, having your own website can be a more versatile and productive way of selling your services
To help their traceability you should make sure that your name and contact information is in the copyright and data fields in the metadata of your images. You should also add a watermark to your images, which includes your name or a company logo, to deter people from copying your images. These won’t prevent people stealing images if they are absolutely determined to, but these simple steps will make it less likely. Getting found online There’s no point having the best website in the world if nobody knows it’s there, so getting your website found online is as important as the content and design of the site. You should start by promoting your website as much as possible, through friends, family and on social media. This can help start driving traffic to your site, but for the website to really succeed you need it to be found among the millions of other sites on the web, which is where the world of search engine optimization (or SEO) comes in. There are loads of books, guides and even companies offering to help with the SEO of websites, but before you start spending lots of cash on these you need to make sure that you have the basic elements in place to make your site as search engine-friendly as possible.
For this, you need to put in place a few simple things on your website, so that it can be found by search engines such as Google. No search engine can easily recognize images on their own, so you should start by making sure that all of your images have keywords attached to them (you can do this easily in software such as Adobe Lightroom). Keywords should include the location or subject, along with more words that people are likely to search for that describe the picture and its contents.
Search engines will scan the text on your site, but this is often limited to the first few lines, so you need to make sure that these areas of the text have as many words or phrases that describe the content and that people are likely to search for. You should also try to include links within your site to different pages.
Along with what is on your site, you should also try to get as many links back from other websites as you can. First of all you can link it to any social media accounts that you have, then you can also ask other sites to link back to yours. This shows search engines that your site has content that is interesting enough for others to want to link to, which improves its search rating.
All of these elements are only the start, though, as you should also make sure that the site, text and content are updated regularly to indicate that the site is active. But while updating these areas is good for your ranking with search engines, avoid making changes to the main elements of the site, especially the home page, as this can have a detrimental effect. Payment integration If you want to sell items directly from your website it’s worth using one of the direct payment systems, such as Paypal, on your site. Most website providers or platforms will allow you to accept direct
payment for items by using a system like Paypal. These systems are much more convenient and trusted by users than sending cheques or transferring money. How much time will it take? You can get started with some images on a photo-sharing site in an evening, but getting a basic website up and running will take around a week, depending on how many images you want to put online. With a more complex site, especially if you are designing it yourself, it could take a month or more to get everything set up.
But this is only the starting point, as a successful website needs to be constantly updated with new images and content, and you have to factor in the time needed to make sure that social media and online networking is helping to drive traffic to your site.
This all means that you can get started by putting your images up online very quickly and easily, but expect it to take a few months before you really start to reap the rewards of this approach. You also need to set aside a few hours each week to keep the site updated and make use of social media. How much can I make? While you can make some cash from selling prints directly from a website, for many photographers it’s much more useful as a marketing tool, enabling potential clients to see what’s possible. So, it’s hard to put actual figures on what income a website will generate, but for a wedding or portrait photographer, a good website can bring in a significant proportion of your customers, while selling prints directly can generate a small income as long as you take the time to promote your site.