Are you a photographer looking to take your photography business to the next level by building your photography portfolio website? This guide explains everything you need to know to create your photography portfolio website for showcasing your photos online.
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Your photographs tell a story and so should your photography portfolio. Unimaginative resumes and business cards are passé. Instagram, Twitter and other social media platforms are not the best mediums for visual storytelling. The best way to express yourself as a creator and showcase your unique creative identity is through a professional website for your photography portfolio.
Take charge of your career as a photographer and grow your business. Build the perfect photography website to showcase your photography portfolio, market yourself, get bookings, share photographs with clients, and sell your services. Get inspired by these outstanding examples of the best photography portfolio websites.
Looking for some inspiration to build your beautiful photography portfolio? Discover these stunning online photography portfolio websites built on Pixpa, by top photographers around the world.
Pixpa’s all-in-one portfolio website builder empowers photographers and creators to showcase, share and sell their work online, easily without any coding knowledge.
Top 25 reasons to choose Pixpa to build your photography portfolio website
Start with professionally designed online modelling portfolio website templates that fit your site & style. Make it your own with our simple & powerful visual style editor. Customize further with HTML editing and CSS overrides.
Follow these 4 steps to build your online photography portfolio website.
Pick your photography website template
Choose from professional, responsive photography portfolio website templates tailored to meet your requirements. Customise all visual elements easily to create your unique style.
Add your content
Add pages to your photography portfolio website menu using Pixpa’s drag-and-drop website builder. No coding required.
Add the features you need
Expand your fashion portfolio website’s capabilities. Add an online store, start a photography blog, use client galleries, and do much more.
Promote your photography portfolio website
Use Pixpa’s built-in SEO, marketing and social tools to grow your traffic and convert visitors to clients and customers.
Creating your own online model portfolio website doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, you don’t need to hire a developer or touch a line of code. Pixpa’s intuitive drag and drop builder makes it easy to build your professional photography portfolio.
Here are 10 expert tips to guide you on how to build your photography portfolio website.
TIP 1
When it comes to building your photography portfolio, you must define a clear set of goals. What do you want your portfolio website to look like? What do you want your visitors and potential clients to see when they land on your website? Do you simply want a website for presenting your photography portfolio or do you want it to be more? How do you plan on using your photography portfolio website?
When you work on a big project for a client, your goal is to add value and contribute productively to their work or their life. Your website should perform the same function for you. Visualize a website that can contribute positively towards your creative career
Once you are clear on what kind of a website you want, you can start taking the necessary steps towards creating it. Browse through these amazing photography portfolios to get started. You might also want to read our step-by-step guide to becoming a professional photographer that would help you stand out from the crowd.
TIP 2
When you have a proper vision in place, it's easier to be selective about what you showcase on your website. Always remember that less is more.
Be strategic with what you do and what you add. The idea is to effectively communicate your brand to customers.
Think about who your audience is. If you deal mainly with corporate clients, the kind of work you would showcase would be to attract those kinds of clients.
If you work with several different genres of photography, it is a good idea to section off your website to showcase your whole skillset and expertise. Plan your photography portfolio website’s layout in a way that allows you to display your skills in different genres to clients in different industries.
TIP 3
You do not need any coding skills to build your own website, what you do need is the right photography portfolio website template.
Look for clean, easy to navigate and fast-loading photography website templates to ensure the best user experience. Also make sure that your website looks good on both desktop and mobile screens.The majority of web traffic on the internet today comes from mobile devices. The last thing you want is for your photography portfolio website to fall behind with the times.
Also review the features offered by your website template to ensure that you are getting everything you need for your photography portfolio. Make sure there are multiple gallery options, client proofing tools, comprehensive eCommerce features, marketing tools, a range of third party integrations and more. Check out our extensive photography portfolio website templates to find one that is best for you
TIP 4
Curate your best work and showcase only that in your photography portfolio. You may think, especially when you’re starting out, that you need to show a lot of work to prove that you are experienced. However, a few excellent pieces are a much better representation of your expertise than several mediocre pieces. After all, you want to make a good first impression on potential clients and visitors.
Take a critical look at all of your work, especially your most recent work. Try to see which projects best showcase your expertise as a photographer, which photographs properly illustrate the length and breadth of your skillset and your range, and which images are the most aesthetically appealing to clients from a purely commercial perspective. Do read our article with great photography tips to help you get started.
Each piece you display on your photography portfolio website should fulfill a function. In other words, it should add value to your photography portfolio and to the story that you are trying to tell through it.
TIP 5
Less is always more. Don’t overcrowd your photography portfolio, instead use white space to balance parts of the page. A clean, minimalist, easy-to-navigate website is much more user friendly and makes a much better first impression. See our guide on how to design your website.
Your website reflects your personal aesthetic taste, so create a photography portfolio website that you would be proud to show off to a client.
Think about your website as a whole. Keep all the different sections and pages of your website consistent in terms of color, design, theme etc. It's fun to experiment but don’t go too overboard. Don’t make a website that is so over complicated that it becomes confusing.
Always remember that, at its heart, website building is about storytelling. You want your website to be able to tell a story in an easy, compelling and most importantly comprehensible way.
TIP 6
Establishing a brand helps you stand out from the crowd. It helps you distinguish yourself from other photographers and establish your originality, authenticity and credibility as a photographer. Your brand is basically your response to why anyone should hire you and no one else.
You need your photography portfolio website to represent and reflect your brand. A personalized, custom website is a step forward towards creating your own brand. But you can always add more.
A custom domain name and a personalized brand logo can give your brand identity and make it more recognizable. Having your own personalized logo is also helpful because it is a visual representation of your business. Branding is an important process in improving your credibility and authority as a creative professional and business owner.
TIP 7
What makes your photography the way it is? What is the process behind the images you create? Sharing your creative process allows you to convey the true depth of the work that you create. There is definitely a difference between simply seeing a photograph and knowing the story behind it. Your photography portfolio is a place where you can share this story and talk about some of the behind the scenes secrets to your photography.
The best way of doing this is to add a blog section to your photography portfolio website where you can talk more about your creative process. This will make your portfolio website more than just a collection of images. It will add personality and context.
Blogs are a good way to increase web traffic to your website and help you gain more exposure and business opportunities.
Through your blog you can document not just your work but also share your passion as a photographer and tell people why you do what you do in the first place.
TIP 8
This is after all your photography portfolio website and it should look and feel that way. You have your own unique identity and you must customize your website to make it look yours.
Adding an 'About' page and a blog can help you better showcase the person behind the lens. The ‘About’ page is a section of your website where you have the opportunity to introduce and market yourself, the photographer, not just the photographs. Add forms so that potential clients can contact you directly. You can also include a call-to-action and invite your visitors to email you directly to follow you on your social media channels.
Soft skills and communication abilities are important when you are running a business. Show yourself - the person - in your photography portfolio. Communicate that there's a real person behind the lens making all of this fantastic work.
TIP 9
Marketing is an essential component of growing your business and it is a component that takes constant and active effort. In order to be able to use your website as an efficient marketing tool for your photography business, you need to spread the word about your photography portfolio website. Link your portfolio website on your social media channels, put it on your business cards, tell people about it and send out links. This way you can get visitors and traffic to your website so that you can actually showcase your photography portfolio.
Apart from this, make sure you have good marketing tools attached to your website as well. Marketing pop ups, announcement bars, newsletter services and SEO tools help you turn your photography portfolio website into a comprehensive tool for selling your services and products.
You can be the best in class photographer around. But to actually get hired for projects you need to put yourself out there, spread the word about your talents and services and actively promote yourself.
TIP 10
The easiest and most cost effective way of improving your website’s organic reach is through search engine optimization. Doing this can make your website more searchable and generate more traffic through Google search results. Here is a complete guide on SEO for photographers and creators.
Your photography portfolio website can only help you grow if you can use it to attract clients. SEO helps you do exactly that. Research the right keywords and learn SEO basics in order to make the best possible use of your website.
Search engine optimization can be as easy as ensuring your photography portfolio website is well coded and loads fast. Some other ways of ensuring search engine optimization are clean URLs, automatic sitemap, image alt tags, 256-bit SSL certificates, and built-in SEO tools. Adding a blog to your photography portfolio website can be an excellent way of improving your search engine rankings. Through your blog you can incorporate various long-form keywords that can help you rank better on search engines.
Keep your photography portfolio website up to date. Keep up a steady stream of new and unique projects and, more importantly, keep posting them on your online photography portfolio website.
Keep updating your blog with new posts, add galleries, and newer projects as you go on. Also, keep sharing content from your photography portfolio website on your social media channels. Don’t let your website be forgotten!
What makes a photography portfolio website perfect? How can you make your portfolio stand out from the rest? It may all seem very challenging but it is really not. Here is a list of things you should consider including in your photography portfolio website.
What do you want someone to see when they click on your website for the very first time? A beautiful, modern landing page is absolutely essential when you are looking to make a good first impression. After all, you want to turn visitors into clients and for that, impressions matter.
This is your opportunity to forge a personal connection with potential clients. Put yourself out there. Communicate through your work but don’t forget the human behind the lens. A good headshot, a short but authentic biographical note as well as a statement on your artistic philosophy and creative process are must-have additions to this page. Do read our article with great tips on how to write content for your website.
Your photography portfolio website should only feature your best work. Curate pieces that show your skills and expertise in a wide range of lighting conditions, locations, and genres. Also make sure that you are selecting recent work or at the very least work that fits your current style and accurately represents the kind of work you are doing now.
If you are a photographer who works in different genres, your photography portfolio should reflect that. However, make sure you create different galleries or albums for different categories. This makes your website neat, coherent and easy to navigate. User experience matters.
With client galleries you can create dedicated private or public galleries for each individual client. Client galleries can be used not just for sharing and proofing your work but also for making sales. These galleries offer exclusivity and convenience for both you and your clients making them an amazing selling point for your photography business.
Make sure you have a contact form on your photography portfolio website so that potential clients can contact you directly for enquiries and bookings. After all, your website is supposed to be an easy one stop shop for you to grow your business. No one likes jumping through hoops. A contact form is an easy and convenient way of converting site visitors into paying clients.
Your photography portfolio is a collection of your best, curated work. Your photography portfolio is an important tool that lets you share your photographs and resume with potential clients and employers and show them your expertise, technical skills,method and style. While earlier it was common to carry big, physical copies of your portfolio, these days hosting your photography portfolio on your own custom website is easier and enables you to reach a wider audience.
Since your photography portfolio is so essential to your creative career, you need to ensure that it reaches the right audience. An online portfolio website saves you the trouble of sharing materials, samples and resumes individually, as you can simply link your website with potential clients. An online portfolio website also enables you to use in-built SEO and marketing tools to promote yourself better and improve your reach organically. Your online photography portfolio website can reach a much wider audience than would otherwise be possible for you.
Yes! With website builder platforms like Pixpa you can create your very own custom photography portfolio website without touching even a single line of code. Pixpa’s intuitive drag and drop visual editor and powerful web design tools enable you to customize each and every aspect of your website at the drop of a hat. All you need to do is pick out a template, add pages, galleries etc and customize your website to your exact preferences and requirements. No coding required!
You can start building your photography portfolio website with Pixpa’s 15-day full featured trial for free. No credit card required for sign up. Pixpa’s all-inclusive subscription plans start from as little as $7/month with no hidden costs. All plans come with a 30-day money back guarantee and offer unlimited bandwidth, SSL certificates and 24/7 support.
