By Wayne Cosshall
A website is a key part of any business and most hobbies these days, and especially so in photography. But getting it right is key. Even though the Internet has become an obvious and essential part of what photographers do, there are still many mistakes people inadvertently make.
Mistake number one is trying to do business using a Yahoo, MSN, or other free email address. These just stink of being either a spammer or an amateur. Because using these sites suggests a lack of stability (and thus unreliability), you can really limit your marketing opportunities.
Mistake number two is relying on the free or low-cost photo-hosting sites to present your professional portfolio. Yes, some people do this, hard as it might seem to believe. Again, it immediately conveys either that you’re an amateur or someone who has no idea of business.
Mistake number three is developing a totally unsuitable custom website. This might be unsuitable in many ways, as we’ll discuss later, but such a site can actually turn some potential customers away. So, how do you do it right?
Step 1: Register a domain name with a reliable and major domain registrar (so you will have no dramas later). The domain name is not critical but ideally needs to be something you can tell people over the phone without a strong likelihood of them getting it wrong. This can be your business name or something else, so long as it makes sense.
Step 2: Set up a website hosting service with a reliable company. This should not be your ISP, the service you use to connect to the Internet. Look for Linux hosting rather than Microsoft servers. This will give you more free options and is often cheaper. A good hosting account will allow you to easily create multiple email addresses and monitor traffic to your site (statistics). It will also make it easy to control other features, such as installing open source gallery software.
Step 3: Set up a number of email addresses for yourself. For example, you might want to have one you can publish on public forums and another address that you use for direct business contact. Multiple email addresses also allow you to create the impression that you have a larger organization than you actually have.Step 4: Do some research. Clarify why you want to have a web presence, who the most typical and most important users of your site will be, and what equipment they are likely to use to view your site. Keep in mind what information matters most to them, not you. Look closely at a wide range of other photographers’ websites, and not just the ones you personally like.
Step 5: Develop a website to suit your customers, based on the research you did in Step 4. When I look at photographers’ websites, I usually see a lot of over- engineered, fancy, and time-wasting sites that don’t work for the site visitors. Sadly, many photographers won’t listen to recommendations for improvement, because they think they know it all visually. But if you are a small-town wedding/portrait photographer, for example, your clients are likely to be local people with slow Internet connections, old computers, and small screens. The site must be designed accordingly, or you might lose business. Conversely, if you are a big-city fashion photographer, your clients are ad agencies and magazines, with fast Internet connections, larger screens and a sense of style (plus attitude). This requires a very different type of site than that required by the small-town wedding photographer.
Do you get the idea? It’s not you and your aesthetics that matter with a website, it is your clients. If you have diverse clients perhaps you need two websites that you market to appropriate audiences.This client orientation will help you determine elements such as: what screen size the site should be designed for, whether Flash (an overused technology on photographer sites) should even be considered, and whether you can stray too far from normal navigation conventions.
Unless you really know what you are doing, pay someone to design your website for you. Don’t skimp on this. During the design process, look for alternative ways of doing things. For example, many of the sites I develop now use a content-management system so that photographers themselves can upload new images or change text. This way they aren’t reliant on me to make changes to the site except to update the look. It costs them a little more up front, but reduces costs long term.
Finally, plan to revamp your site on a yearly basis. This doesn’t have to be a major overhaul every year, but a bit of a touchup keeps the site looking fresh and in line with current trends. If your site is well designed by your web developer, a yearly update shouldn’t be a costly exercise.
Step 6: Market your website. The website itself won’t bring you much work on its own. It actually just forms part of your marketing effort; it is not the complete answer. If you have followed these steps, your email address should help promote the site. The site URL (www.cosshall.com, for example) should be on your business cards, car, all ads, etc. Keep fresh content on your website and never put a visible visitor counter on your site.Done well, a website is a great asset. Done poorly it is a liability. Which is yours?
You can read more on this topic on my online magazine The Digital Imagemaker.
Posted
06-06-2008 6:27 PM
by
Eileen Fritsch