Showing off professional photos is not enough on social media. You also need a photography website. Why? Apart from displaying photos, a website is a weapon to increase the credibility of your business. Clients will certainly trust the services of photographers who have a website more than those who do not have a website.
So, in this article, you will be guided to create a cool photography website. Immediately, see the complete guide below!
How to Make a Cool Photography Website
To create a photography website, you need the following easy steps:
1. Define and Register a Domain Name
The first step of website development for photography is deciding and registering a domain name.
Did you know that the domain name actually affects the success of your photography website. The more unique and easy to remember, the more likely your website will be noticed and visited by many people.
2. Choose a Web Hosting Service
The next step is to register a domain and purchase web hosting services. In choosing a web hosting service, choose the best hosting for your website.
For photography websites, choose hosting with high server performance, security, and 24 hour support. This is important so that your website can always be accessed by visitors. You certainly don’t want your website to go down when potential clients visit your website, do you? You might lose the opportunity to get customers.
Therefore, we recommend that you buy a trusted web hosting service.
3. Install WordPress
Why WordPress? Even though there are many Content Management System platforms that can be used to create websites. That’s because there are so many advantages of WordPress compared to other CMS.
So, here are some of the advantages of WordPress that are worthy of being a CMS choice for websites.
– Easy to setup
You can easily do the installation and setup of WordPress manually yourself.
– Free
WordPress is an open source CMS that you can use for free.
– Many themes are available
WordPress also provides thousands of themes that can make it easier for you to adjust the appearance or design of your website without the need for coding at all.
– Free to install plugins
You can also add website features according to your needs by installing a wide selection of plugins provided by WordPress.
4. Choose an Attractive Template
After being able to access the WordPress Dashboard, you can start setting up your website, from theme to content. Let’s start by choosing an attractive website theme.
A website without an attractive theme, who would want to take a glance? Moreover, your photography website is intended for portfolios or looking for clients. Your reputation or your brand might go into freefall. You will lose opportunities to get new jobs or clients.
Relax, you don’t need to worry because WordPress provides many attractive and free template variants to install. However, you may be confused about which template is suitable for web photography.
5. Install the Required Plugins
To help improve the performance of WordPress features, you need to install several plugins. Here are some of the best WordPress plugins that you need to install to optimize your website’s performance.
– Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin to improve the SEO of a website. With Yoast SEO, you can optimize easily so that your website can appear on the first page of Google search.
The Yoast SEO plugin provides quite complete features to improve a website’s SEO, such as changing the SEO title and meta description, XML Sitemap, Permalinks, Meta Robot, Google Snippet, and SEO on-page Analysis.
– Envira Gallery
A photography website without a picture gallery sure sounds weird, doesn’t it? Therefore, you need a gallery plugin to create an attractive photo gallery. That way, visitors can easily view your photos.
In Envira Gallery, there is a Drag and Drop Builder feature that can make it easier for you to create photo galleries and display them in your posts. As the name suggests, in sorting out the photos that you will upload, you only need to drag and drop them to the post.
You also don’t need to worry that your photo gallery display doesn’t fit when viewed from a mobile device. That’s because the galleries you create with Envira Gallery have a responsive or user-friendly design on any device.
– Tiny PNG
Photo files that are too large often make the upload process take a long time. Not only that, the performance of your website will also decrease until finally it is slow when accessed by visitors.
For that, you need to compress your photos first. In WordPress you can easily compress photos with the Tiny PNG Plugin. Tiny PNG has Automatic JPEG and PNG Quality features so you can compress photos without worrying about the quality of the photos decreasing.
– MailChimp
MailChimp is an email marketing service that is used to send emails to subscribers or website subscribers. With this plugin, you can design forms to get emails from visitors.
Features owned by MailChimp include various campaign options, automatic email sending, email marketing optimization, integration with other applications, etc.
These features will make it easier for you to execute your marketing strategy. You can stay connected with your customers to make it easier for you to offer certain services or promos.
– Jetpacks
This plugin can be considered as a complete plugin package. You can monitor the security of your website, optimize website performance, to website management.
Jetpack can also optimize image size. That way, your website load speed can remain optimal. In addition, this plugin has also been integrated with SEO analytics tools so you can analyze the number of leads, the length of time visitors are on the website, etc.
6. Add Photos and Content
After choosing a suitable template and installing some plugins, you can start adding photos and content to your website. However, don’t just add an image. You need to create the concept first.
It will be great if the photos you upload are grouped according to category or theme. For example photos of project weddings, company brands, and natural themes.
So, to make it easier for you to upload photos, we recommend that you create a gallery first. Galleries are the media that every photographer needs to showcase their work. You can create great photo galleries with Envira gallery.
7. Create “About” and “Contact” Pages
You need to display a description of your profile on the website that you have created. The profile description is very important. Even so important, you need to create a special page about this. Usually this page is named “About Me”, “About Us”, or “About”.
On this page, you can fill in any skills and projects that you have handled in the field of photography.
8. Perform SEO Optimization
The last step and the step that must always be done is optimizing the SEO of your photography website. Optimizing website SEO is very important so that your website can appear on the first page of search results.
SEO itself can actually be divided into two types, namely on-page and off-page SEO. As the name suggests, this optimization involves aspects inside and outside the website page.
In optimizing on-page SEO for photography websites, one thing that cannot be overlooked is optimizing SEO images. The number of photos on a photography website will affect website performance, so you need to optimize every photo on your photography website.
Why Need a Photography Website?
From the method above, now you can make a cool photography website, right? By having a photography website, there are many benefits that you can get. What are the benefits of a photography website that you will get? Let’s look at the description below.
1. Easier to Find on Google
Just having a social media account to introduce your brand and photography services is not enough. Your business should also be found on Google.
Why? As we know, almost all internet users usually use Google to find various information. Therefore, you must have a website for your business.
Armed with a website, your business can appear on Google search pages. If it appears on Google, your business website has a very high chance of being seen by more people.
2. More Credible
Having a photography website can increase your credibility as a professional photographer. Surveys have also proven, as many as 84% of business owners believe that a website makes their business more credible than just having social media.
On your website, visitors can immediately see the results of your photo shots. Visitors can also find out how you are in the world of photography. That way, visitors will have more trust in your photographer service business.
3. Easy to do online promotions
Websites can help you to succeed in business promotion strategies on various promotional platforms such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and other social media ads.
By having a website, you can more easily promote your business online. People who click on your ad can be directed directly to your website. Then, visitors can immediately see the offer and make an order or purchase. Sales of your photography services can also increase.
Create Your Photography Website Now!
In this article you have learned how to make a great photography website.
Starting from determining the domain name, choosing hosting, determining the template, to optimizing it. You also know the importance of having a photography website for photographers.
You certainly don’t want to waste this opportunity, do you? So, immediately prepare a name for your photography website and register the domain name to build a cool photography website.
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