Website Examples

Hi,

I'm not sure if this is the correct forum, but I didn't really see one that was appropriate. However I am considering redoing my website and and am looking for inspiration by looking at other pro photographers websites. Mostly in the portrait photography realm (specifically newborns, maternity, and families).

Additionally I'm contemplating moving my website to a wordpress system instead of what I'm currently running which is more of a home-grown system.

That said if you'd like to show of your site - I'd love to see them. If your running a wordpress site and your comfortable saying so, it would be great if you shared the theme name as well.




Many thanks

Jeff

The problem with posting one's website is that not only will you be looking at it but a zillion other people from Dpreview. I don't want to have to deal with that on my site's stats. I have enough problems with my competition weasels hitting on me from Google to drive up my costs.

That's ok...I guess I should restate. I don't need to see your website - I'm mostly interested in those that are using wordpress and the theme they are using. So if someone doesn't want to provide their website address, then I'd be ok with just knowing the theme name and I can do the rest of the work to see what my site would/could look like with that theme.

But of course, I'm not forcing anyone here - so if nobody on dpreview want's to give praise to their site and/or theme manufacturer that's ok.

28to70 said:

28to70 wrote:

The problem with posting one's website is that not only will you be looking at it but a zillion other people from Dpreview. I don't want to have to deal with that on my site's stats. I have enough problems with my competition weasels hitting on me from Google to drive up my costs.

Click to expand...

You have that right!

Get off Google, you are wasting your money.

I did a trial on it and what I noticed is that yes I got hits, but they were just hits.. Definitely people just clicking on it .. Now let me say this, you hope that or think that the clicks are coming from your competition, right? Wrong, I will bet the farm google themselves are doing it..to make you think you are spending your advertising dollars smart.. nope..

Stay away from Wedding Wire. I know for a fact they click on your link.. everybody are crooks these days.

You need a few galleries specific to your specialty with outstanding content. You need a contact page with your city state country and a simple way to reach. If you decide to have a blog, make t as simple as possible with no ads and no mentions of camera gear or post processing. Digital or film is all a customer needs to know, and even that's pushing it. That's really it. The container you put it in doesn't much matter.

Did I mention outstanding content? Because favorite pics mean nothing. Determine what speaks to people and shows your shooting style.

The two biggest mistakes made by portrait wedding guys - they don't put their city anywhere on the site, and they talk about their gear.

What is the purpose of your website?

How does it do now, what do you want it to do better or differently?

I ask because if you can't answer these questions then your on a trip with no map and no destination - so how do you know if your on the right track or even arrived?

My opinion - and there are many of course - is i want the website to make the phone ring with people ready to book an appointment.
I don't want 100 calls asking about price. While I have samples online that's not my 'product' (web/online/files images) but prints and albums. I'm not selling stock images or any of the images I have online. (this affects of course one's decision on website backend, flash vs html perhaps, etc). I also don't update these images often.
I have a lot of text on my site, and my site is html. These things allow webcrawlers to 'read' and index the site, for the site to come up quick, to be seen on apple devices, etc.

I'm not super concerned about mobile surfing.
My goal is to give them enough info to decide if they want to go further and call me and book - 90% of the calls I get I book into sessions or wed meets. That's what I want. I update/change my site every 2 weeks to keep the files 'fresh' as far as google is concerned (dead sites don't index well).

Now I have a friend in the city that thinks very differently than me - he's got a WP blog, a website, all mobile friendly, he posts to his blog and names the image files by venue/florist and other things so a bride searching 'hilton hotel' will pull up his images/blog.

I do mine myself. He pays a college intern to keep his up to date plus a guy that works for him likes to play on the web and did all the checking/testing/tweaking. Large investment in time and $250/month in ongoing costs. He feels it's worth it to him.

Another thing to consider - the biggest (in dollar/volume/employee) studio in my county didn't have a website till last year. It is not the be all end all to success.

It has to be found when prospects are looking for you. It has to be easy to navigate. It must have your contact info on every page, big and bold. It must have enough info (compared to your competition) to convince folks to call you first.

Ohnostudio said:

Ohnostudio wrote:

The container you put it in doesn't much matter.

Click to expand...

It does matter to me, because if there is something I want to do, or make my site more fluid between sections, and the container holding my site won't or doesn't allow this then that causes a problem for me. Which is why I'm looking toward wordpress versus my current homegrown system. And with wordpress there are themes that will allow you to do things that others wont because of the technology those themes employ.

I get that the content is everything, and what types of content (contact pages, galleries, etc). I was just hoping the community would be more open to sharing what technology they are using for their sites....much like we do with the gear we use.

While I"m a big proponent of 'think like a business owner' there are times you need to put yourself in your customers shoes.

Your website is one of those times.

There are many places you can find results on web site usage from surveys and observations. Go find the top websites (of any kind/type) and go visit them.

What do you see? What do they all have in common?

You want to know this for several reasons, but a big one is those sites are what consumers are used to using. Copy the layout/menu/structure, perhaps even color. Yes, you want to stand out and be remembered, but if your site is hard to use, confusing, weird colors, etc folks will just give up and go to the next google result for photographer.

Call it 'ergonomics' if you wish because that's what it is. we read left to right top to bottom and trying to get people to act otherwise is just going to discourage them. "Search" functions are always in the upper right on websites/browsers/email, etc. That's where people are used to looking.

You have to make it easy for people to do business with you.

Also remember that 90% of our customers are female and their minds are different - as in they like more feminine colors, fonts, etc (aka NOT black..sorry dpr). Just hit a newstand and look at women oriented magazines vs mens mags and you'll see lots of differences. THose folks have spent a fortune to figure out what works - you don't have a fortune to spend on this so copy them.

I'm involved in a couple of businesses. My own site is out of date and has changed purposes several times, and is a mixed bag right now. Please don't use it as a template for yours - my subjects are mostly not humans. www.briankilgore.com

Most of my time is spent with a different company, and we are just about to open a new site. For this, we did all the thinking, basic writing, and photography, including many pictures brought forward from our about-to-disappear site.

We had a writer edit the words so the site's various pages fit together, examples were consistent, and so on.

A couple of weeks ago e e-mailed all the words, with instructions of what went on each page and what linked to what, to a web designer / developer we've been working with on behalf of several other clients.

She set up a development site and placed the copy, sized the type, etc. and posted it for us to look at. We printed it all out and my partner and I then went over all the copy, making changes as needed.

We'd sent some photos with the original copy, and this week we dropped all the other photos we want into a Word documents, and put them on a CD, took the document and the CD to UPS yesterday and $28 later it arrived at the designer's office at 9:43 this morning.

She'll assemble everything and I expect it will be up by Monday.

Her fee is $100 a page, and the site's 38 pages long.

It's in WordPress, and we'll handle minor changes, and pay her $100 an hour for othr, bigger, changes.

MUSE: Look up Adobe Muse on the Adobe.com web site. It's a low priced user friendly web site creation program.

PHOTOGRAPHER AS DESIGNER?: An argument could be made that a good photographer should at least think through the overall site architecture.

WORDPRESS: I would never get near it if I could avoid it, but my partner and the designer believe in it and time is precious to us. No free hours to do it myself.

BAK

Refrain from using hip hop or rap music. Believe me, one of my fellow photographers used rap music in his website and wondered why it was not generating hits or calls.

Keep your music simple like instrumentals. If a website has heavy metal music, rap, hip hop or just noisy music; I immediate exit the site. I am a fan of heavy metal but not for a website!

I'm not a pro but I do use Wordpress and the Photocrati theme to host my photos (link in sig below). I like the fact that it is very customisable.

Dan Marchant said:

Dan Marchant wrote:

I'm not a pro but I do use Wordpress and the Photocrati theme to host my photos (link in sig below). I like the fact that it is very customisable.

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Thank you

Visit Jakob Nielsen's site at www.nngroup.com and sign up for his free mailings. He studies usability.

If you shoot seniors, he'll report on how teens use the web differently than their parents.

BAK

I use a WordPress theme from Press75.com

However, it appears that the theme I bought from there is no longer being sold. You can check mine out at www.vandervalk.ca

Simple. Easy. Cost Effective. I paid $75 for my theme and have it hosted at GoDaddy.

(I'm actually a web designer but chose to get a theme because I feel it was faster to do so and was less in need of a wow design but rather let the images showcase themselves.)

First, I'm not a Pro.

I'm using the MediaReel theme on a Wordpress foundation. There are some features of the theme I don't use, mostly notably the blog.

I love the way the home page appears. I've fallen out of love with the gallery pages (I'd prefer a carousel-style rather than thumbnails).


www.michaelneilodonnell.com

jbsmith said:

jbsmith wrote:

jbsmith said:

Ohnostudio wrote:

The container you put it in doesn't much matter.

Click to expand...

It does matter to me, because if there is something I want to do, or make my site more fluid between sections,

Click to expand...

What can be more easy than navigation you can see instead of what is regarded as "intuitive" nebulous icons you have to guess at?

jbsmith said:

I was just hoping the community would be more open to sharing what technology they are using for their sites....much like we do with the gear we use.

Click to expand...

Find sites you like. View Source. If it's a template site, it should be in there because a lot of license agreements have terms against stripping it the source info.

every study i've ever heard of says NO MUSIC.


Want more proof? Go look at popular websites...NO MUSIC. If google or facebook or amazon thought music would sell they'd have it- no doubts about that.

music on a site is a big red flag that says 'amateur' website.

Heck - go to the Microsoft website - no sound. apple, no sound. itunes even - they SELL music and you don't get music.

Give Zenfolio a test drive and see if it suits you. It has a built-in blog option and you can sell prints via your Zenfolio website. You can have a fully-functional photography website by the end of the day. It is a lot less hassle than creating and maintaining a Wordpress website and the price is right. There are many sample Zenfolio websites at Zenfolio.com.

Agreed. Music is such a personal preference it is far too easy to pick something that people wont like.