Creating a photography website can be very intimidated to the photography business owner.  Typically as photographers, we have a great eye for design, patterns and color so our first inclination is to make a website that appeals to our visual nature.  However, little attention is paid to the actual purpose of the website which eventually leads to a beautiful but ineffective website.

The purpose of this article is to help the home based or studio based photography business owner to establish an effective website.  First of what is the definition of an effective website for your business?

In short, an effective website for a photography business is one that:

  1. Brings in new clients
  2. Helps retain current clients
  3. Screens out bad clients

If you already have a website and it is not doing each of those three things, then it is time for a major overhaul.  All of these three objectives are easily achievable.  In fact new technology on the internet makes it easier than ever to reach new clients and stay in touch with your current clients.

There are also a few other considerations to keep in mind when building your website.  These will make your life a whole lot easier and save you a lot of money.  These consideration are:

Easy to update

If it is difficult to update your website, then you will never do it. Anything that takes too much time is the first thing to go when things get busy and you can’t afford to have a website that is more pain than profit.   But when you have a site that is easy to update, it will always have fresh new content for your current clients to look at.  This will help them return to you again and again.

Inexpensive

Most small business owners don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on a website. Nor do they have hundreds of dollars to spend each month on maintaining it.  The good news is that it is possible to build a highly effective website for very little money up front.  I have never built a site that cost more than $200.  In many cases, there was no upfront cost at all except for the hosting fee.  And by choosing the right webhost your monthly cost for webhosting will be less than the price of a single movie ticket.

Professional Appearance

Putting out a bad first impression is worse than no impression at all. So your website needs to present an appearance that impresses your potential clients. Now above I mentioned that photographers often make the mistake of spending all their time on the website design and none on the marketing effectiveness.  So why here do I say that the design is important?  Well  you are in the photography business which is a highly visual enterprise.  So you don’t want to come across as amateur by having a poorly designed and ugly website.  Luckily it is easy to have a great looking site without losing any of the marketing effectiveness.

Engages the visitor

When you visit a website how long is your average stay?  It is probably less than 10 seconds.  This is about average.  So you can see how important it is to grab your visitors attention and provide them what they want quickly and easily.  If your website visitor has to endure endless animations, slow-loading images, or a splash page you are essentially driving them away.

Tracks Results

The single most important item in successful businesses is the ability to track what works.  By knowing how and why people are visiting your site, you will be able to capitalize on trends and increase visitors. All of which means more clients for you! This is actually very easy using a free tool put  by Google called Google Analytics. By inserting a small piece of code on your site you are able to see how visitors arrived at your site, what areas they visited and where the left.  This is invaluable in targeting your marketing campaign.

So there are a few considerations and rules to live by in setting up your photography business website.  I wish you the best success in your business endeavors!