Photography Website

Step by Step

Set your focus

Before turning your computer on and opening your favorite website builder, sit down a minute and ask yourself what your exact aim is. Is it to attract more clients? To display your latest photography project? Or a bit of both? Your mind must be set before you start, since it’ll help you choose the right images and organize them better.

Typically, most photographers will use the same website to display different genres. It’s perfectly fine, as long as you draw a clear line of separation in between. Simply create multiple galleries, one for each category displayed: weddings, portraits, street captures, etc. If you have a particularly large set of projects, or if certain artistic works are hard to reconcile with your more commercial work (you document cemeteries around the world and make a living by photographing newborns), you might consider going for separate websites. The good news is that, with Wix, you can create as many as you wish – all of them for free.

Give it your best shots

Now that you’ve decided which collections of works you want to display on your online portfolio, it’s time to choose the shots. It’s important to keep in mind that your website doesn’t have the same function as your Instagram account. Here, you don’t want to publish every single picture that you took, in order to raise engagement. On the contrary: your website is meant to display only your best, most representative pieces in each category.

In a nutshell, always pick quality over quantity. Our recommendation: you can go for 20 to 30 pictures per gallery maximum. It’s preferable to leave your visitors with a desire for more, rather than “overfeeding” them. Plus, overloading your website with images might make it slower – and you know that Internet users are not the most patient, especially on mobile.

Imagine your layout

The layout is the visual structure of your portfolio. For a photographer, the driving idea is to make sure that your images remain at the very center – and thus get the attention they deserve. The first way to do this is by going for a refined design, with a minimum of items. A black (“dark”, in the web design slang) or white (“clean”) background is also recommended, since it makes your photos naturally stand out. Second, consider the type of display you want to use. It should fit the dominant format of your pictures: long scrolling if you take a lot of verticals images (like portraits), thumbnails for horizontal ones, etc. To help you out, here is a very clear guide on choosing the right layout for your online portfolio.

Need inspiration? Have a look at the websites of photographers you admire and how they organized their work. You can begin by using one of the many Wix templates for photographers created specifically by our designers with artists and professionals in mind. Of course, they’re entirely customizable – from the header to the footer – so you’re website will undoubtedly be unique and tell the only story worth mentioning: yours.

Add the right pages

It’s time to do something you may not have done since the 12th grade: take a pencil to paper. You’ll use them to create the architecture of your site, that is to say the way your pages are connected to one another. Of course, you can adjust your plan at any moment with the Wix Editor, but try to be as detailed possible: it will considerably ease your workload in the coming stages.

Now write out which pages (or sections) you want on your website and where they will be placed, in order of importance. As a photographer, you don’t need too many.