Photography Portfolio — How To Build A Photography Website For Yourself

Photography as a business or profession requires the photographer to engage in showcasing their work to potential clients. Choosing to create photo-streams on Flickr, 1x.com, deviantArt, etc has always been an option for digital photographers to share their photographs with target audience. On the same lines, building your own photography portfolio website serves as an advantage.

Building photography portfolio website serves the purpose of establishing authority and professional identity as the photographer, both at the same time. Creating a website has become fairly simple and even non-technical people can get their hands at it. WordPress, Blogger, Concrete5, etc have made it possible even for the photographers to build their online portfolios with great ease.

Tips For Building Online Portfolio

Building online portfolio is not only about showcasing your work, it also requires you to publicize yourself as the photographer. Here we have some beautifully designed photography portfolio sites. Just have a look. When designing the online portfolio keeping the following tips handy will help you make an impressive portfolio website.

1. Image Galleries / Showcase: The best part of building online portfolio is the freedom in showcasing your work. Thus, including the image galleries or perhaps the showcase is a smart move for exhibiting your best works. That is why most of the themes designed for photographers have prominent image sliders. Though be a little careful when creating the image galleries and look at the following aspects for making your image galleries strike the mood of the audience.
   

   Grazie Italia! by Pensiero

   • Image Selection: The photographic portfolio is the presentation of the photographer’s work. It is the medium of expressing your style and experience as the photographer. It is not possible to include all the images in the portfolio. Sort the images on the basis of theme or categories and create multiple showcases for each type of photography you are engaged in.
   • Quality vs Quantity: “Quality speaks”. It is always better to focus on quality more than the quantity. It is better to include 5-10 technically accurate images in the portfolio than 20 images of poor quality.
   • Theme Based: When creating the image gallery or showcase for your website, try to sort the images on the basis of theme. It helps the viewers in relating to the scenario and thus heightens the emotions and mood on the part of the viewers.
2. Enclose Personal Information: About Me and Contact pages play an important role in revealing your identity to the potential customers. These pages provide you the platform for voicing your achievements and an opportunity for potential customers to connect with you for future references.
3. Establishing Authority: Along side the image galleries, integrating the blog to the main website helps in establishing your authority as the photographer. The blogs serve as the platform for sharing your experiences, knowledge and expertise with the fans and helps in maintaining the freshness of the website (which results in better search ranking of your website).
4. Commercial Aspect / Motive: The primary purpose of establishing an online portfolio is to help the photographer grow their business. Showcasing your best works and disclosures about the projects and clients raise the confidence and interest among the online audience.

Tools For Building Online Portfolio

Here are some free tools for building online portfolio website for photographers. You can simply start with following the instructions and build the website without any technical know-how.

1. WordPress.com: WordPress.com is a good option to start with. Apart from enabling you to build website free of cost, it provides scores of customization features, like gorgeous themes and useful widgets to help you create the portfolio with great ease.
2. Google Sites: With Google Sites, creating a site is as easy as editing a document. You don’t even need to know HTML for building the website. It provides various templates, customization options and allows uploads & attachments to ease the task of building online portfolio.
3. Blogger: Blogger is another free tool offered by Google. Blogger is a good option for maintaining the blogs and thus keeping in touch with your fans on regular basis. It provides you the platform for sharing your knowledge and expertise on photography.
4. Wix.com: Wix.com is specifically designed to help the photographers in establishing online identity. It simplifies the task of creating online portfolio for the photographer by providing easy to use drag and drop editor with customization features. It enables you to import photos from anywhere on the web to create professional quality image galleries or showcases.
   
5. Hosting Your Own Domain: If you want complete control over the design and customization of your portfolio website, nothing beats a custom Domain + Hosting combo. You can register a domain and opt for a hosting package with it. And you can use a CMS of your choice or build a website from scratch. Need help with this option? Contact us for building your online portfolio.

Check out the second articles in the series Photography Portfolio here.