Video guide with tips to help improve your photography website.
Video transcript
How do you add that extra WOW factor to boost your business and impress potential clients? At Format, we offer a Website Building Service where members are paired with an experienced designer to re-organize and reimagine their websites. Here are 5 tips to Improve your Photography Website. Throughout this video, we show you how our team has used these design principles to transform the websites of photographers to boost the user experience of their sites.
Tip 1: Hero Images.
Open your site with a full bleed image or slideshow. These elements add drama and impact to your homepage and help set the tone for clients viewing your site. Having a slideshow with a few of your strongest images shows confidence.
Before: Here is a before video of Ashley’s Site. Previously, her site opened onto a friendly welcome statement, but there were no images to support this. You had to navigate to another page to see some examples.
After: To transform her site, our experts added hero images to her homepage to show off her various services. Those intro messages were incorporated with hero images to give a warm and friendly intro to her services.
Tip 2: Summarize your services through images.
Consider outlining your services with images links on your homepage so visitors to your site get an instant snapshot of your business. Draw clients in with beautiful images, a quick description of your services and then link out to related galleries so that they can see more examples of this work.
Before: Previously, Brenna’s site opened onto a gallery page with different types of work that were only labeled in the image captions making it hard to discern what services she offered.
After: We built Brenna a stunning homepage that marries her images with her message. Some key features of her homepage are a quick summary of her services using image and text blocks as well as a slideshow with links out to book her various shoot types.
Tip 3: Organize your navigation to reiterate your services.
The first tip to a good user experience on your website is a clear and concise navigation. I like to organize the navigation of websites to clearly spell out the key services that a photographer is offering. In Ashley and Brenna’s Sites we did this in a couple of different ways.
On Ashley’s site we created a “Galleries” Collection page with image links that correspond with each of her services. This works well since she is offering a number of different shoot types.
On Brenna’s site, since she does a lot of location-based work, we organized her navigation into “People” “Places” and “Branding” This instantly tells a visitor to her site the type of work she does. Each of these links goes to a collection page of sub-galleries.
Collection pages are a great way to organize related pages on your site. Long site menus or drop-down menus can be prohibitive for mobile engagement. Collection pages also work really well for mobile viewing because they are easier to scroll through. They give potential clients a preview of the type of work they will see on each page.
Tip 4: Develop a strong About Me page.
Clients who are looking to hire a photographer for events or projects like to get a sense of who is behind the camera and the philosophies you bring to your practice. Having a robust about me page with a great headshot, testimonials from past projects, and a few personal details, will help clients to connect the photographer to the photographs.
Ashley’s site now boasts a beautiful About Me page with photographs of her with her family. Since she works primarily in family photography, making that connection to her own family shows her passion for this work.
Brenna’s connection to the outdoors is really important to her photography. To make sure this message was the first thing visitors saw on her site, we made her “About Me” page her homepage. Opening your site directly onto your “about me” page is a great way to immediately introduce potential clients to you and your services.
Tip 5: Impact Statements.
Add impact statements to draw clients into key information throughout your site. Highlight these statements with typography shifts and/or pops of color to make this information stand out. Think about the key sentiment you would like a client to retain for each page on your website and make a bold and beautiful impact statement so they can’t forget.
Before: For example, Brenna’s website had beautiful writing, but this text was hidden in image captions.
After: We used Brenna’s beautiful writing throughout her site as impact statements to introduce her and her services. These impact statements serve as instant snapshots to the philosophies behind her work and the type of experience her clients can expect.
Through Format’s Website Building Service, our team of experienced designers can work with you not only on the look and feel of your site, but to help you organize and articulate your message to your clients. As designers who specialize in portfolio websites, we can work with you to streamline the design and navigation of your site for the best possible user experience. If you would like help adding the WOW factor to your website, please reach out to our Website Building Service.
Reach us at our live chat or via our email info@format.com if you have any more questions. We’re happy to help!