Five Great Website Builders for Photographers!
Today's websites are yesterday's storefronts. They are a must-have if you want to be a professional photographer. A website is typically the first glimpse of you and your work for a potential client.
Get it wrong, make it too complicated, fail to incorporate SEO, display low-res images, or just put out there a boring website, and you risk losing clients before you even talk to them. A great site, on the other hand, can convert clicks into sales and new clients.
Right about now you might be thinking you'll have to spend thousands on building a website or updating an old one. Yes, you can do that. But, you can also create one yourself.
Here are five website building sites ideal for a photographer's unique needs.
1. ZenFolio
If a top-notch photo gallery is at the top of your wishlist, check out ZenFolio. It's one of the best - if not the best - for photo galleries. This entire site is built toward that end. You can optimize presentations, enable effects, and take advantage of its plentiful automatic adjustments.
It's unlimited storage, fast and responsiveness are added bonuses. It offers various products, price variants, and payment processing. But, among its desirable features, image protection and watermarking are water set it apart as an excellent building platform for photographers.
2. Format
When you don't know how to code (or don't want to learn), a fully customisable website should be seriously enticing. Format is one such platform. It's intuitive, powerful, offers high-def, numerous templates, galleries (ideal for photographers), and retina themes.
3. Photoshelter
A highly flexible platform, PhotoShelter is another very desirable one for photographers. It offers more than 100 features that are effective and easy to use, including real-time editing and cloud storage. The platform provides excellent ways to showcase your images across slideshows and galleries.
Its real strength, however, is its eCommerce platform. It's selling features are excellent, allowing for easy selling, payment processing, flexible pricing, and the (critically important) ability to manage rights and royalties to your images. Lastly, it integrates SEO features and analytics.
4. Squarespace
Another intuitive platform (SEO is an integral part of it) loaded with features, Squarespace is well known among photographers - and for excellent reasons. It's user-friendly in significant part because it's loaded with free templates in various categories. The templates themselves are also easy to use and customize to your needs.
You can easily drag and drop images from your desktop, and you'll find the uploading responsive with the ability to customize images. Squarespace uses Lightbox presentation, making it easy to add multiple galleries across your website. But its rockstar features or capabilities don't end there. There's social media, blogging, and eCommerce.
5. Wix
Wix is known as the go-to website for novice builders. It offers a good assortment of templates, color schemes, free images, and preset palettes, and lots of free features and resources. It's relatively easy to use and customize, making it a great site builder for beginners. It offers excellent photo gallery options and slideshows, allowing you to build visually stunning pages.
It's so easy to use that some professional website builders use it knowing that someone else will be managing its future content once the site is completed. The site offers integrated payment processing in a way that makes it popular with those who want to focus on sales. Wix provides a 24/7 support center, tutorials, and a lot of support.
Having a standout website doesn't have to cost you thousands of dollars. You can save that money and build one yourself. However, it will take some time, patience, and commitment. Get to know whichever website builder you use and spend time experimenting with the best looks and features for your business.