Do you have a website?
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Hey neighbours. It’s good to be with you. This time I want to ask if you have taken the time to make a website for your photography. Well, have you?
Let me try to clarify. By website, I mean a web location with a URL that you own and control as well as content that you build.
A website is not a replacement for social media, if you do that sort of thing, or even an existing online portfolio. There are excellent portfolio tools that make organization simple and don’t require any coding. The days of having to learn HTML and CSS are no longer requirements, nor is there a requirement to learn the ins and outs of web building software such as Dreamweaver for basic image display.
Your Online Portfolio
Lots of folks subscribe to the photographer’s bundle from Adobe to get Lightroom and Photoshop on a subscription. What some folks forget is that the bundle includes a lot of web only tools, one of them being Adobe Portfolio. Adobe Portfolio is an incredibly easy tool to use that is what is called “No Code” It’s a template driven, drag and drop portfolio builder. If you don’t have at minimum an online portfolio that you are the boss of, you really must take a look at it. There are plenty of tutorials, the learning curve is really short and you can be up and done in under 30 minutes. It’s also very scalable if all you need is a portfolio. The only downside is that Adobe support is not that good and it’s often hard to get online with someone not just reading a script. Find out more about Adobe Portfolio here.
Selling Sites
Other people subscribed some years back to an online portfolio that is also a web store for your images. The best known one is probably SmugMug. It is also very easy to use, and you can sync to it directly from Lightroom. You can still drag and drop your images and layouts are quite flexible. The added benefit is that SmugMug is a web store, so you can sell prints of your images right from the site. Support is very good and the folks there are responsive. Find out more about SmugMug here.
Full Websites
It is my opinion, and that of other marketing and brand professionals that you need to own your content and control its placement. Posting on Instagram or TikTok may get you viewers, but you are at the mercy of the hosting application in terms of how easy or difficult it is to find your work and how quickly it gets knocked to page 312 by other folks posting afterwards. Unless you have folks already following you, your post is generally new for less than a minute before it scrolls off the page. What you want to do, no matter where and how you share your images, is to get your own website into the post so people who want to see more of your work can easily and quickly do so.
Your personal website is how that’s done.
There’s a phrase that says you get what you pay for. Many domain registrars also offer basic website hosting, where you build a site using common public domain tools, typically licenses under the GPL. This software, referred to as open source, let’s you use it as you wish. Support will range from community based to none at all, and will require some investment of time building knowledge or paying someone to do the work for you. When it’s free, that’s what you get, but even open source tools such as Wordpress need to be hosted somewhere and you would want some choice in terms of space and bandwidth allocation. These criteria are managed for you in Portfolio and SmugMug.
Your more professional hosting experience will cost you some money, typically monthly or annually. The quality of the environment and the support infrastructure have an impact on cost. Popular tools for this kind of thing include Weekly and Squarespace. Weebly has the look and feel of a personal tool but does a fine job, whereas Squarespace was clearly designed with business in mind, yet offers a wonderful personal package.
For your own website, you need your own domain. Tools like Squarespace will actually facilitate your search and purchase of your domain name and when you buy a package after a trial will even give you the first year at no cost. Domain names consist of two parts. Something unique about you and then the extension. You would think of extensions as .com or .ca or .photo Buying and registering a domain has never been easier and you don’t need to wade through pages and pages of ads trying to sell you stuff that you don’t need such as you will find with a big registrar like GoDaddy. The registrar you choose has nothing to do with the effectiveness of your website. Once a domain is registered and you link your page to it, the internet search engines take care of getting people to your site.
A better website host will also automate things like completing SEO fields to make things easier for web search engines. They might include or partner with email providers if you want email addresses for your domain. Some even offer full commerce engines that are super powerful, at some extra cost.
I have built sites for myself and for clients on a number of different platforms including Wordpress, pure HTML and Squarespace. I moved a client to Squarespace a number of years ago because always up and fast response were critical to them. Now it’s the only service that I use. I find their pricing fair, their support superb, and the platform very easy to use. It is basically No Code, but you can modify styles with custom CSS if you wish and you can insert HTML code blocks if you wish. I’ve never experienced an outage or suffered a distributed denial of service attack on a Squarespace site. As I have noted, there are many hosting platforms, but my choice is Squarespace. You can learn more here.
No matter what type of creative you are, you want and should have a website. This does mean work on your part to keep it up, and to be adding and changing content on it but that’s a small price to pay to own and control your own content.
Do you have an idea for an article, tutorial, video or podcast? Do you have an imaging question unrelated to this article? Send me an email directly at ross@thephotovideoguy.ca or post in the comments. When you email your questions on any imaging topic, I will try to respond within a day.
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I'm Ross Chevalier, thanks for reading, watching and listening and until next time, peace.
