Having a website is an essential ingredient to your success.

Not only does having a website give you that competitive edge, but it also offers you a platform to show off your photography skills.

Plus, what photographer doesn’t have their own website?

We get it. You’re a pro when it comes to aspect ratio, aperture, burst mode, depth of field, and other photographic terms. But, when it comes to WordPress, plugins, themes, user experience, and sliders, you may not be quite so confident.

Guess what? Building a photography website is way easier than you might imagine!

By the end of this article, you’ll be a pro at creating photography websites as well. And you never know. You just might add a new skill to your repertoire!

Ready to build a photography website? Let’s dive in!

How to Build a Photography Website in 12 Simple Steps

We’ve laid it all out to make the website building process really simple. From the planning stage to building and maintaining your website, it’s all here in this guide.

Step #1: Set Clear Goals

What is the purpose of your website? Is it to show off your photography? Is it to land a new client or freelance jobs? Are you planning to sell your photographs online?

By having a clear goal, you will be better positioned to plan your website development. You’ll know whether you just need a landing page, a full business website, a website plus online store, or an online portfolio.

If you’re planning to feature an online store, you can plan which payment and shipping providers to use as well.

The best way to go about doing this is by looking at competitor websites. While you needn’t copy their entire structure, you could take inspiration and judge what’s working and what’s not.

Then you can come up with a plan to do better!

Step #2: Arrange Your Best Photographs by Theme

An important point to consider while setting your website goals is to categorize your photographs by theme.

You may have photos of weddings, product launches, nature, wildlife, festivals, exhibitions, and more.

Instead of dumping all your photos into a generic gallery, categorizing your photos makes for a better user experience.

It also helps users navigate to exactly what they want to see.

While we’re on this topic of arranging your photographs by theme, it would make sense to have your images optimized and set to a specific size.

High-resolution images, especially with complex backgrounds are great to see, no two ways about that. But they take up a lot of space and can slow your website. A background remover for photographers could slightly ease the problem by simplifying your images, all while keeping them high-quality.

Nobody wants a slow website!

Optimizing your photos overcomes that challenge. Photo editors such as Adobe Photoshop do a great job of optimizing your images for the web.

If you’re using WordPress, you can also install plugins such as Smush, which optimizes your images without affecting the photo quality.

We recommend using both methods for maximum impact!

Step #3: Build Your Platform

Now that we’re clear on our website goals and have our photographs in place, it’s time to build our photography website.

A search on Google for web platforms will throw up several results. From Wix to Squarespace, you’ve genuinely got a lot of options to build your website.

While all these options are plentiful and beginner-friendly, we recommend an option that drives more than 42% of the websites worldwide. WordPress (that’s wordpress.org)!

WordPress offers unmatched customization and flexibility that no other platform offers. While there’s a slight learning curve, once you get the hang of it, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how simple and easy it is to create a website using WordPress.

Not to mention, if you want to add extra functionality to your website, you could do so easily by using a WordPress plugin.

Want to start selling photographs on your website? Install the WooCommerce plugin.
Want to easily add your portfolio across your website? Install the WP Portfolio plugin.

All this without being tied to a subscription plan, which is not the case with some other popular website builders!

To get started with building a website using WordPress, all you need is to purchase a domain and hosting. A way to ensure your creative business really stands out from the crowd is with a .studio domain, which can help create a solid connection in the minds of your customers.

While selecting a web host, look for one that offers specific WordPress hosting. It helps you get started with WordPress immediately, without having to go through the installation process.

Everything will be installed and set up for you. All you’ll need to do is add a theme, some plugins and your content.

Step #4: Choose the Perfect WordPress Theme

Once you have installed WordPress or bought hosting with it already installed, you now need to install a theme.

A WordPress theme provides the look and feel of your website. The colors, typography, design, and layout, all are part of your theme.

While it’s natural to get carried away with the many beautifully designed themes on the market, we recommend you spend some time evaluating them for more than just looks.

After all, your website’s performance and speed are also dependent on the WordPress theme you select.

We’ve made this decision easy for you. Install the Astra theme.

Astra is a hugely popular WordPress theme that has been installed on more than a million websites. Websites built using the Astra theme load super fast, are mobile responsive, and search engine friendly.

Their library of 180+ professionally designed Starter Templates offers a pre-built website demo for just about any niche or industry.

Using their one-click import feature, you can import a Starter Template and have your photography website ready in a matter of minutes.

All you have to do is add the actual content, and you are good to go live!

The Astra theme can be customized just the way you want. Use your favorite page builder or even the Gutenberg block editor to customize your pages.

We’ve got an in-depth article on how you can build your website using the Astra theme and Smart Slider 3 to help you.

Step #5: Include the Right Pages

As you’ve planned your website’s goals early on, this step should be easy.

If you are creating a portfolio website, the typical pages can be home page, about, portfolio, gallery, blog, and contact. If you are including an online store, then you may have the shop page as well.

Irrespective of the pages you create, we recommend you add a personal touch. Feature yourself on the website and let your audience connect to the person behind those fantastic photographs.

This definitely helps land new clients!

Creating web pages is pretty straightforward. It’s all the more manageable if you’ve installed an Astra Starter Template. All the pages are done for you, and you’ve just got to add the actual content.

Another way to stand out from the crowd is to install the WordPress Smart Slider 3 plugin.

Smart Slider 3 is a powerful WordPress plugin used to create sliders effortlessly. The sliders are fully responsive, optimized for search engines, and work with just about any WordPress theme.

Once you’ve installed the Smart Slider 3 plugin, you can create stunning pages that showcase your work in great-looking slideshows anywhere on your website.

Whether it’s adding a slider on a page or creating an entire page using a range of templates, the Smart Slider 3 plugin makes creating pages super easy.

We recommend using a slider on your home page above the fold. You could also create smaller sliders on category pages or your store page too. Smart Slider 3 makes it easy.

Using the drag-and-drop builder, you can customize the template just the way you want.

Step #6: How to Create a Portfolio Page

Next comes the most crucial page of our photography website, the portfolio page. After all, the primary purpose of creating a photography website is to display our portfolio, right?

One way to go about adding a portfolio page is by using the WP Portfolio plugin.

Using the WP Portfolio Plugin

WP Portfolio is a simple yet powerful WordPress plugin that allows you to easily create some fantastic portfolio pages. It’s developed by the same team behind the very popular Astra theme and several other world-class products.

Once you install the plugin, you can either showcase a set of pre-built website templates on your website or add your own photographs as part of your portfolio.

WP Portfolio uses shortcodes. Once you have created a portfolio or two, you can embed them anywhere on your site using those shortcodes.

Just copy the individual shortcode for the gallery and place it within a Gutenberg block or page builder block.

Easy!

Using Portfolio Categories Template Slider

Another way to add a portfolio page is by using our Smart Slider 3 plugin.

When you install our plugin, you have access to some well-designed templates. One such template is the portfolio page.

It’s completely done for you. All you’ve to do is customize it to fit into your overall design.

Step #7: Add Photos and Content

We’ve got most of our pages in place. We have to add the actual content and photos, and we should be almost good to go.

A picture is worth a thousand words. You’ve undoubtedly heard this before.

As tempting as it can be to add a lot of written content to your pages, we recommend you not go overboard and let your photographs do the talking.

Add just enough to tell the story or set the scene and then leave your images to work their magic.

Adding a blog to your photography website? You can write all you want there!

Step #8: Connect to Social Media

Social media is a great way to engage with your audience. Based on your niche, some networks may drive more engagement than others.

For instance, platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest are great for displaying your photographs and portfolio. These platforms are more visual and are great for your niche.

Did you know that there are over 500 million users on Instagram daily and approximately 454 million users monthly on Pinterest?

By including your website link on your profile bio, you could leverage some of that traffic.

Common places to display your social media icons are on the website header, footer, side navigation, or on a sticky bar that can appear anywhere on your website.

Popular social network WordPress plugins include Social Media Share Buttons and Social Sharing Plugin – Sassy Social Share, among many others.

Login via Social Media Account

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Want to allow users to log in using their social media accounts?

Social logins allow you to offer an alternative for your users to log in instead of using an email address. It’s an innovative method to build a community quickly.

Visitors can register using their social media accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

Nextend Social Login is one such free plugin that easily allows you to add social login. In addition to your WordPress login, Nextend Social Login seamlessly integrates with the various registration forms on your website.

Step #9: Optimize Your Photography Website’s SEO

Recall us recommending you add just enough content to tell the story on your website? Well, here’s why.

Understandably, your photography website is going to be all about the images. While it’s excellent to see pictures, that doesn’t go well with search engines.

Search engines look out for keywords within your content to index your pages and cannot understand images (yet). Without written content, the search engines will struggle to understand, and therefore, rank your website.

While you can add some content to your pages, you should also consider optimizing your images to rank better in Google images.

Start by naming your photographs appropriately. A random image name, such as ‘img234568.jpg’ doesn’t do as much justice as what ‘holiday-at-maldives.jpg’ would do.

Additionally, including the alt-text and description of the images goes a long way in getting found on Google images.

Step #10: Optimize for Mobile Devices

More than half the traffic on a website is from mobile devices and that’s increasing all the time.

This only reinforces the fact that your photography website has to be responsive and fully optimized for mobile devices.

Fortunately, the heavy lifting is done for you when you build a website using the Astra theme and our Smart Slider 3 plugin.

Both are fully responsive and will ensure your website works properly on any device.

Step #11: Ask for Feedback

Ready to make your site live? How about asking for some feedback first?

Share your website URL with friends, family, or colleagues and ask them for feedback. You’ll be surprised by the feedback they could come back with. It’s like having an in-house QA (quality assurance) team!

Take it from us, when you spend hours, days, or weeks working on a website design, you’ll be amazed at what you miss!

Having people you trust provide feedback is incredibly useful.

Be it typos, images not loading properly on a specific browser, an unresponsive call to action, or any other issue, knowing ahead of go-live can really save your blushes!

You never know. You may just land up with some pre-launch inquiries too!

Step #12: Keep Your Site Updated

Congratulations, your website is ready to go live!

Pat yourself on the back to remind yourself that your work is only half done.

On a more serious note, while building your website was important, maintaining it is equally important.

Whether it’s regular content updates, adding new photographs, updating your plugins and themes, running a website is a continuous process. And one that we feel you’ll love doing!
Conclusion
Having a website is more a necessity than an option. It’s all part of building an online brand and getting your name and your work out there.

Whether it’s to showcase your portfolio, create an online profile, land a new job or even get new clients, building a portfolio website is a must-have tool to beat the competition.

Fortunately, building a portfolio website to showcase your photography skills is simple with the range of tools and resources available. With tools such as WordPress and Smart Slider, creating stunning pages has never been easier!

The post How to Build a Photography Website: A Step-by-Step Guide appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.

If that is the case for you, you came to the right place. Here we will cover six of the basic things to consider when you are launching your first or even your second blog. Maybe the first one was a learning experience, but you are definitely 110% all-in with the second one.

There is all bunch of stuff that you should think of before you kick off your blogging adventure in style. From the name and the website to main topics and themes, you would write about, and loads in between. And if you are serious about it, you should most definitely set long-term plans and even specific goals you would like to achieve on a monthly and annual basis. That could simply be to write a blog post every single day.

To make your lives a tad simpler and the realization of your blog smoother, read along and get the gist of it. Of course, you should not miss staying up to date with the modern web and tech regulations, to keep your blog delivering the most stupendous experience at all times.

1. Niche topics or generic

If you have not defined it yet, you first need to think about what exactly will you even write about. Will it be something generic or will you start a niche blog. Will there be how-to’s or will you write about your personal experience. Or maybe you are starting a food blog which you will use to share your recipes and other delicacies.

The list of options and possibilities is endless.

One of the best ways to kick off your blogging journey is to have a niche approach with an option to expand. Who knows how large your blog grows in the coming months or years. Have the room to grow to different topics and provide your massive audience even more quality content they naturally cannot live without anymore.

When getting yourself into blogging, first, do not think short-term and, second, do not do it for the sake of money only. Once you get rid of the two, you are on the right path.

2. Name and domain name

When you have it sorted out, what you will write about, you want to pick a name and the domain name. Of course, you would want to make the two identical. To achieve that, you might open up a domain name registrar and type in all sorts of ideas that come to your mind and see if the domain name is free.

Again, if it is something more niche, you might even include the keyword in both name and domain name. Still, that is not necessary, as Google is smart enough to figure out what your page is all about with time. But definitely keep it short, simple and easy to read. After all, the name might also be your logo, so do not over complicate.

Before we go further, if you are unsure how to start a blog, there are loads of how-tos and tutorials out there that will help you out. Bear in mind, the process is way simpler than you think and you definitely do not need to be a professional designer nor a programmer to bring it to life. In fact, you do not even need to know how to code at all to craft a compelling and modern blog and realize your ideas.

3. Deliver quality over quantity

Content is king even to this day. And if you read it differently somewhere else, well, forget about it and stick with the “content is king” statement. This is the base of your entire blog after all. And even if you are expanding a corporate website or even an online store with a blog, still, make sure to deliver extraordinary articles that will be of great value to the end user.

That said, have in mind that blogging less is better than blogging frequently. Of course, when it comes to the former, you need to understand that the time and effort you will put into each piece is significantly higher compared to the shorter articles. Do not aim for quantity, aim for quality all day.

Even after you release a particular article that works today but might not be applicable one year from now, simply go back, re-edit it and publish it again. Improving your published posts is also a great tactic that will benefit your blog but, most importantly, your readers.

4. Knowing the tech & SEO basics is rewarding

No doubt, even if you have the pure fundamentals of web development, design and search engine optimization, managing and maintaining your fresh blog will be much easier. On the other hand, with all the tools and technology available today, you do not really need to know how to do the tech stuff to make a website. In short, when selecting a striking, professional and sophisticated blog theme, most of the work is already done for you.

Moreover, as far as SEO goes, if WordPress is your go-to content management system (CMS), Yoast SEO is the plugin you should use. No ifs, no buts, no maybes, download the tool and it will help you on your journey to success.

What’s more, if you have any background in Photoshop, that would be of fantastic value as well. However, if you are not really tech-savvy, Canva is a spectacular service that will help you sort out all your image content.

5. Consider adding a social login feature

No doubt, with your blog, you can create a solid and loyal community of trustworthy members. To offer you readers to create accounts on your website, there is no need to complicate with some advanced login and registration forms. Simply select the Nextend Social Login plugin as WordPress social login. It is a free WordPress extension that offers your visitors to register using nothing but their preferred social media account. This could be Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn.

Integrating Nextend Social Login plugin into your page is smooth and effortless to make sure all levels of users can make it a reality. Besides, you can also style and fine-tune the tool to suit your branding to a T with ease. Of course, you can also upgrade to a pro plan (Single Domain or Business) and step things up.

6. Have a long-term plan

Like you saw me mention it already, to have a long-term plan is almost a necessity. In brief, if you are in for the short-term, consider twice if it is even worth putting all the effort into it. Sure, you might use it for your portfolio but all the rest, it would be best to avoid the whole idea.

Meanwhile, if you are in because you are passionate about it and you want to have something that you are in complete control of, have a long-term plan and make your lives a lot easier. And this does not necessarily mean that you want to make money with your blog. Sure, every blogger’s dream is to blog full-time, but approaching it with this mentality might do more harm than good. You are in for fun, to deliver extraordinary and compelling content and grow a community.

The post 6 Things To Consider Before Starting A New Blog appeared first on Smart Slider 3 — WordPress Plugin.