![]() Find a color scheme that enhances the majority of your work. Not every photo is complimented by a black or white background. A good frame compliments the art its purpose is to showcase your photography – it should never overpower it. Define the content you want on your site, organize it into logical sections, and develop clear and consistent navigation for getting between the different parts of your site. The pages should be intuitive and easy to understand, and you may be able to direct the visitor through your pages. Your website should do much the same, with certain key items carefully positioned within the site to draw attention. They know where to put target merchandise, what items to put near entrances, what to put near cash registers, how people will browse through the store, and how to direct the flow of customers through the various departments within the store. While no two commercial chain stores are exactly alike, the overall structure and floor plan of each is often the same. Take a lesson from retail stores who have made marketing to the masses a science. You will want to make it easy for them to find what they are looking for. Not that every person who visits is going to give you money (wouldn’t that be nice), but they are searching for something: information, photos, or just otherwise browsing your merchandise. I believe that every visitor that comes to a photography website should be treated as a shopper. Defining your audience will also help you better develop a floor plan, design, and infrastructure for your site. Building a site that only looks good on a monster 24″ monitor will alienate the vast majority of visitors who will most likely be on a 17″ monitor. Also, study your visitors’ typical screen resolutions, browsers, operating systems, and whatever other relevant information you can collect. This function requires gallery software that may not be necessary if the site is mainly for family and friends to visit. For example, if your target audience is graphic artists and editors, they will want the ability to quickly search a database or stock list of your work. At first you will need to make some educated guesses about who will be visiting your site later, as traffic grows, website statistics programs will let you analyze the habits and demographics of your visitors. Hand in hand with defining your site’s purpose is the need to identify your target audience. This will give your site the ability to expand as your goals change over time. Clearly define your goals, both immediate and long-term, for your site. Don’t start building a website just because everyone else has one. Are you building a place for your friends and family to see your photos, do you want a searchable database for editors to look for stock photos, a virtual storefront to sell prints, or some combination of these? Really think about what you want to achieve with your website and the reasons for having one. What is your site’s purpose? Defining the purpose of your site is a critical but often overlooked step. Looking to build a site for the first time, or thinking of redesigning your site? These steps will help you plan and build a site that truly compliments your work. ![]() As with photography, learning just the technical side of the craft and ignoring the art does not produce the best results. It requires planning, foresight, and a thorough understanding of the elements of design. It had no life it was sterile and it did not compliment my work.Ī few designs and many clients later, I have found that to build an attractive, functional, and successful website to showcase your photography requires more than just technical knowledge of how to code a website. ![]() I applied every skill I had used building corporate intranet sites, and produced a site that was, well, blah. I built websites for years before nature photography ensnared me, so when it came time to build a site to show my photos I thought it would be a breeze.
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