Geared to help Professional Photographers online...
As a professional photographer and website designer, I have great insight into the website marketing needs of professional photographers.
Keep it simple
People are hiring you for your photography skills,
not for flashy gimmicks on your website.
All of my websites are custom design, hand-coded, and will be designed to reflect the image you want to convey for your business. I specialize in creating professional photography websites, showing off your photography in a clean, well-designed, fast-loading manner, making the right first impression.
Image Galleries:
Your image galleries are the most important aspect of your website. They must be neat looking, fast-loading, and easy to use.
After looking at a lot of photographers' websites, I have come to many conclusions about what works well and what can be highly annoying. I create your image galleries with the following specific points in mind...
Thumbnails:
I prefer to use thumbnails so your viewer can choose which images to view and go back to their favorites instantly,
rather than show screen-filling photographs with an arrow to the right or left at the bottom of the page.
Neat thumbnail alignment:
Haphazardly arranged thumbnail galleries look sloppy and unprofessional. Thumbnail galleries should be aligned neatly to the side of the page, allowing the full-sized image to load and display in the main body of the page WITHOUT SCROLLING.
No Pop-Up windows:
I don't particularly like galleries that utilize Pop-up windows for showing larger images for a few reasons. Many browsers today come with Pop-up Blockers. A pop-up window takes you away from the thumbnail navigation, many times leaving you to either have to close the window after each image, or leaving you with only "next" and "previous" navigation.
Quick loading images:
There is no need to display your images at high resolution. All it does is make it take longer to load.
A high-quality JPEG image has a large file size; a low-quality JPEG has a small size. Somewhere between these extremes lies an optimal file size that looks virtually indistinguishable from the original.
People will simply leave your site if it's too slow. When pages take longer than about 10 seconds to load, people lose interest fast and go elsewhere.
Click these links to see samples of my preferred gallery layout. Notice they are quick loading, there is no scrolling required between images, no pop-up windows, and cleanly aligned thumbnail images for a polished, professional look and feel.
