Advanced Topics on Photographers Websites design

So let's see again the characteristics of a good website as presented in the introduction to this site:

A successful photographer's website will:

Present his/her work in the best light

Because of the fierce competition in the professional photography field you simply can't afford to show anything less than your best work and offer the finest services.

Have the best domain name

A domain name is usually chosen for life, otherwise all the marketing efforts, time and money spend on making your domain known will be wasted if you change it.

Load really fast

If your first page does not load in less than 10 seconds you loose most of your visitors. Even the high bandwidth users will be pleasantly surprised by a really fast loading website.

This is the reason we prefer using the "old fashioned" .html instead of Flash for professional websites.

Be easily indexed by search engines

If your website was well designed so the major search engines can index it properly you will get a lot of focused visitors.

Be focused on the right niche to attract the right visitors

If you are a Wedding photographer you need the "brides to be" to see your website and don't care about architects (unless they are going to get married soon :-)

This is why we advocate using different websites if you have very different specialties.

Project the right business image to the potential client

As opposed to plumbing, photography looks so easy that everyone could do it. And if someone still want to hire a photographer, he is going to hire a real Professional. Our image as pro photographers is more important as ever.

Be easy to navigate

Patience is very rare among web surfers, especially since your competition is only two clicks away. Getting a visitor lost in a site is the easiest way to make him to click back to Google.

Contain the right amount of information

Not too much, but not too little either. The latest trend is to have only a few words on the site, if any. Remember that your visitor is here looking for information so you should offer plenty. If you hope that the average potential client is going to E-mail or call you with questions, think again.

Please both human visitors and search engines while keeping loading times as short as possible.

The visitors came here for information and you want them to look at your images. Providing enough information clearly laid out will please the humans and if the site is well designed, will also "feed" the search engine spiders. If you will show high quality images you will have a winning site.

Be hosted on a fast, reliable server

With high uptime and good connectivity to the Net. This should go without saying

Look the same on any major browser, both on Mac and PC

Usually, this is only a dream because there is an endless number of combinations of computers, monitors, browsers and user settings over the Internet.

What we can do is make sure that all the major browsers will show your site as close as possible to the original project.

What we can't do anything about is the user who heavily darkened his monitor to avoid eye strain from the white empty Microsoft Word pages :-)