Photography websites

Your website is often the first impression clients will get of your business and you want to make it a good one. Zenfolio, the all-in-one solution for photographers, shares some tips on how to do so.

Show off your style

Clients hire you because you've got a style that's unique - so your website should be too. Reflect your style, your personality and, of course, your brand from the homepage to checkout page. A custom background and large photo slideshow are a few elements that will make your site memorable.

Keep it together

It's a great time and money saver to keep everything under one roof rather than have one service to host your blog, another for client proofing, and so on. Professional photographers are consolidating so that everything from their portfolio and client galleries to marketing tools and order fulfillment are together in one easy-to-manage place.

Improve your SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be tricky for photography websites because search engines don't recognize images as they crawl websites for content. Keep the following in mind to improve your SEO:

- Build your website with HTML. Flash is invisible to search engines, and makes it very difficult for visitors to view your site on a mobile device.

- Add keywords, descriptions, captions etc. to each of your photos. Sounds like a tedious task, but without them all the search engine will see is a blank page.

- Add pages to your site such as About, Pricing, Testimonials - or anything else you feel would be helpful to your visitors. The text in these pages will help search engines index your site for relevant content as well as make your website more user-friendly for your visitors.

- Have your entire site hosted by the same service. If you use separate services for your blog and portfolio, search engines don’t register those as the same website and the different parts end up competing with each other.

Make shopping simple

If you sell prints (as well as offer bespoke services) make it as simple as possible for customers to buy your work. Having a shopping cart integrated looks professional, but also makes that journey from "viewing" to "buying" smooth and painless. Be sure your shopping cart is built for success by having imperative features such as naming your prices, choosing your products, setting order minimums and fulfilling with a professional lab.

Encourage clients to buy

There are many marketing techniques to maximize your profit-per-customer, for example:

- Bundle products together into a package with a slightly discounted price to encourage your client to buy more than they originally planned.

- Offer gift certificates or coupons towards prints and products as a part of your session fee, to help get clients into a buying frame of mind.

Whether you like to use your social media efforts to drive traffic, or offer packages and promotions to boost profit, make sure your website service offers a robust set of marketing tools.

Want to know more? Download Zenfolio's free e-book with more expert tips on creating a website that works for you.