You’ve spent a lot of time, energy and money developing your photographic portfolio and it’s only natural to want to share it with others. One most obvious means of sharing your portfolio is to build a photo website, allowing you to share your portfolio with a wider audience than you could otherwise.

There are literally thousands of articles on the subject of building website, on the internet or various publications; there are even articles that concentrate on building photo websites. Unfortunately, most of those articles suffer from the same basic limitation; their concentration is solely on writing HTML (the basic language of the World Wide Web) or upon the various tools available for generating HTML. In their zeal, these articles tend to ignore the bigger picture of the philosophy behind web site design; how to design a photo website that effectively shows off a photographic portfolio, while maintaining usability and presentation.

In this article, I will put forth a number of design strategies to help you develop the philosophy behind your website, allowing you to attract visitors to your photo website and retain them.

The Basics

In the world of internet publishing there is a saying that is well known, “content is king.” But, how do you decide what content should to publish, and how to present that content?

Develop your vision. The first step you should consider is “What is the purpose – the vision, if you like - for your website?” The quickest way to lose a visitor is to present your materials in a haphazard fashion. Deciding upfront, what your vision is will guide you in determining how the site should function, how the content should be presented and what content should be presented. As Stephen Covey writes in his 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, “begin with the end in mind.”

But, where to begin defining your vision? What follows are a series of questions that you can use to guide you in the process of defining your vision, to begin the though processes of laying out your website.

• Is the purpose of your online gallery to simply show your images to others? If this is the case, consider presenting your images in one or more image galleries. Define your galleries along the natural lines of your photography; for example, landscape photographers could break down their galleries into location types (ocean scenes, mountains, deserts, etc.), nature photographers into animal or floral types, and travel photographers into different locations (or countries).
   

• Is the purpose of your online gallery to sell your images to others? In this case, you will be concentrating on presenting your work in a manner that presents them in the best possible way; this approach will probably lead to few images on your website, as you concentrate on presentation. You should to be very explicit about what you are selling; list the sizes of photographs available, how they are printed and framed, their method of shipping and delivery. If you are a photographer who sells primarily stock image, then your website will need to have strong searching capabilities. Above all, exercise ruthless editing on the images you do show; present only your best images.
   

• Is the purpose of your website to tell a story, teach others, or to share your experiences? In this case, consider designing your website in a way that highlights your articles; examples of articles you could present include: travel articles or how-to articles on your favorite photographic technique. In this case, image galleries may not be the best way to present your images, your emphasis would be on the articles themselves, with the images complementing your articles.

Plan your presentation. The next step is to look around at other photo websites; put together a list of photographers whose work you admire and the addresses of their websites (to see mine, click here). Then visit these websites and analyze their presentation; remember, take off your photographer hat, and concentrate on their website layout, not their photos. Look to see how the websites you visit, fit into your vision.

Here are a number of things you may wish to keep in mind while looking at these websites:

1. How easy is it to navigate through image galleries? – Look to see if the links are consistent and easy to find; note as well as how easy or hard it is to navigate from one image to another.
    

2. What are the image sizes? – Websites that present their images in a large size may look great, but users who may be using a dialup connection may get frustrated at the length of time it takes to load a page and abandon your website. A better approach is to present your images as thumbnails, which the user will then need to click to view a larger image.
    

3. Are the images watermarked or in some way restricted from download? – Some photographers will go to great lengths to make sure their images are not copied or downloaded. You will need to balance your desire to protect your images with the user’s need to be able to view the images and to navigate through the site (both may be affected). Images that are on a website are a fairly low quality (72dpi) and are not suitable for display anywhere but on a website, but this is something that you, the photographer need to determine.
    

4. Is there a natural flow from one photograph to the next? – Take note whether the images seem to be placed on the site in a haphazard manner, or whether some thought was put into the arrangement of the images. No one wants to look at an image gallery that is just a jumble of images.
    

5. Are the images static and never seem to change? – Perhaps the quickest way to discourage repeat visitors is to keep the same photos up, month after month, year after year. Users get tired of seeing the same images every time they visit. A website that is not updated regularly seems to impart a feeling that the photographer is somewhat lackadaisical about their work. How do you want others to see your work?
    

6. Do you get a feel for the photographer’s personality? – While this item may not seem to be important, letting your visitors get to know who you are builds a sense of familiarity and trust – important if you want your visitors to return, doubly important if you wish to sell your images. You may wish to share your goals (through a mission statement), the philosophy behind your photography (assuming you have one); anything that demonstrates why photography is important to you.

Keep in mind as you visit these websites, just because you admire a photographer’s work, doesn’t mean that their site is well designed or laid out.

Next Steps

Building your Gallery. So far, I have purposely avoided discussing the various tools available to build your photo website. While tools are important - they make building your website easier or harder - site planning and layout should be your primary effort, well before you write your first line of HTML.

There are a number of excellent programs available for this purpose, including Microsoft FrontPage 2003 (this website was built using Microsoft Visual Studio.NET - a somewhat advanced tool geared towards programmers), Macromedia Dreamweaver MX and any number of free programs. Which tool you should use depends upon your comfort level with writing HTML, what operating system your personal computer uses, or how sophisticated your online photo gallery design is. My recommendation for an first time website builder, running Microsoft Windows, is to use Microsoft FrontPage 2003. It is the easiest to learn, provides excellent functionality, and moderate cost, at the same time providing good compliance with the latest HTML standards (older versions of this program, generate complex and sometimes non-standard HTML that some browsers may have trouble displaying properly).

Where and how to begin building your website?

1. Begin by laying out your website’s design, based upon the vision you have defined previously. You can do this on a piece of paper or using any number of software tools; I personally like to use Microsoft Visio for this purpose.
    

2. Next, gather together all of your site’s common elements; such as, common graphics (buttons, etc.), banners, text for your page footers and any other element that you plan on sharing across pages. Most commercial tools provide a wide variety of graphics included with the program.
    

3. Layout your directory structure. Consider keeping common graphic elements in a separate directory from your images. This will make keeping your website up to date in the future much easier; there is nothing more frustrating than trying to find an element when they are all jumbled together in the same directory.
    

4. Scan your images (or have them scanned) and saved in the .jpg format. Make sure your images are in at least two sizes (thumbnails and full presentation size). Note: don’t rely on your browser (using HTML) to size the images for you; it will make your pages take that much longer to download.
    

5. Write the HTML or layout the pages, using your selected tool. If you are unsure how, there are any numbers of excellent books available at your local library or bookstore.

Test viewing your site. After you have built your website, before presenting it to the world, it is important to view your new website as others will view it. Even though Windows/IE is currently the dominant operating system and web browser used today, not everyone uses this combination, and you don’t want to risk antagonizing your visitors. As a minimum, I would recommend viewing your website on both Windows and Macintosh computers, using Netscape Navigator (or Mozilla), Internet Explorer (any version 4.0 or above) as well as the excellent Safari browser (Macintosh only). You may need to find a few friends to help you out with this testing if you don’t have the computers available.

One tip to keep in mind: most operating systems and browsers are able to display pages written to the HTML 4.0 standard quite well. You can test your website for this compliance at the following website: http://validator.w3.org/.

Once you have tested your site, you may need to tweak your pages and test view again. This is an iterative process; view and test.

Finally

Prepare for Change. Once you have finished your online gallery you may think that the hard work has been completed. Not true!! If you want to retain visitors, your gallery needs to change on a regular basis. You might consider adding new images monthly, or some other interval. A good practice is to determine upfront what that interval will be, then stick to it as much as possible – your users will come to expect change.

Advertising your online gallery. Since you have built your site you naturally want to share it with others, but with the hundreds of millions of website now on the Internet finding a site can be difficult. How to advertise your online photo gallery is a difficult question to answer. We have all received spam messages that offer to book our rankings on the search engines. But, is that the answer? There are literally hundreds of search engines on the Internet, but I have found, based upon this websites visitor statistics that most visitors come either through either word of mouth (make sure you website address is on all your business cards, brochures, etc.) and through the Google search engine.

Many search engines use the Open Directory Project (http://www.dmoz.org) as a source for new websites, so you should consider submitting your site to there as well.

Listed below are a list of websites that can provide excellent ideas and suggestions for building your website.

Conclusion

Good luck on the construction of your online photo gallery. I would love to see your new site, please drop me a line with your website’s address. I will do my best to respond, as time permits; I may be on the road taking pictures for my website.

Please direct any comments about this article to robert@visionlandscapes.com.