Easy Ways to Create a Professional Photography Website
Posted by Ivan Storck | Filed under photography
There are so many options available to photographers to create a professional looking portfolio site. Here are just a few I’ve run across in the past couple of months.
SmugMug.com offers template based sites and includes a way to sell your photos, printing, and custom watermarks.
Satellite powered by a flickr professional account. You also need a web hosting account that supports the php programming language to install Satellite on. You don’t have to know any php - but knowing some basic HTML helps. Despite all these steps, this is my current favorite because it’s customizable, can be hosted on many website accounts, and gives you a real web hosting account to play with, which gives you additional benefits of having you@yourdomainname.com email, and the ability to install a WordPress blog like the one you are reading now. To see an example of a Satellite powered site I recently created for a friend, check out Colleen Todd’s. portfolio.
Worried about copying of your images? Consider using steganography (like DigiMarc in Adobe Photoshop) to digitally watermark your photos, although it has been said it reduces quality. An alternative is to put a “bug” in a corner of the image with your name. This can be done in batch mode with a program like iWatermark. Personally, I prefer the bug method, for reasons Ken Rockwell explains.
Want to include a slideshow widget on your site? Check out the Google AJAX Feed Slideshow widget.
Do it yourself portfolios: (free) http://start.uber.com/design can be used for photography or any artwork.
If you have a mac, you may already have the the Apple iLife suite, including iPhoto and iWeb and a dotMac account which can help you make a decent looking portfolio site.
If any of the above methods doesn’t give you a professional web address (URL) of your own, like www.mynamephotos.com - you can use domain masking at a registrar (like SustainableDomains.com) to point to the computer generated URL.
Know of any others, or had experience with the above that you can share? Please let us know in the comments below!
Tags: marketing, photography, technology
February 20th, 2008 at 10:35 am
my current gripe with satellite is that the image details are not displayed upon clicking the thumbnail, within the lightbox window. the user is then required to click a “details” link for further info. i was looking at this software with an artist friend (joechambersart.com) considering a gallery upgrade on his site, and he was frustrated by the “buried” details.
February 27th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
I use a highly customized version of slideshowpro which is the best flash-based portfolio tool out there.
March 5th, 2008 at 10:37 am
Ross pointed out another good page for slideshows to me: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/05/18/30-best-solutions-for-image-galleries-slideshows-lightboxes/
April 23rd, 2008 at 4:47 am
I just checked out smugmug and I’m pretty impressed by what they have. But I want my photography website to look unique and I’m worried it will look a little unoriginal if I use their templates. Are there any other sites you know of with good photography website templates?
Thanks
May 21st, 2008 at 3:34 pm
also http://livebooks.com/ is another service.