Building a basic website for Photographers

Every photographer who is serious about getting noticed should think about getting their own website. Building a site from scratch can be quite a big job, but these days there are some quick and easy ways to get yourself some web presence without having IT skills.

Reasons to have a site include:

- It gives you a place to showcase you work
- It can be viewed all around the world
- It can be viewed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
- A site can be cheap to build
- You can change the content on it as you wish
- You can find clients this way and build contacts

The list of positives is endless.

Here are some quick sites that exist and programs that you can use as someone who wants to promote their photography skills but wants to have a website without hiring a programmer. (These are just a few examples and many more exist on the internet so shop around until you find a provider you are happy with).



1. Websites that use wizards and step by step guides

On these sites you usually pay a small fee each month and you can design your own site easily, using a wizard that asks you a host of questions. It’s normally very easy to tweak the results, such as moving details around the page or changing colors.

Most hosts will give you at least a free page if you buy hosting with them or they will let you build a basic one with them – this can easily be done in a few hours.

Examples:

http://www.websitewizard.com/
http://www.homestead.com
http://www.moonfruit.com

Moon fruit in particular has some nice premade templates for photographers.




2. Software that lets you build a site

If you want to pay for a one off site look at software like www.mrsite.com. Mr. Site gives you an entire website in a box, meaning that you can build everything and have it live on the website without any hassle – everything is included in the box.

After a year or so you have to pay if you want to renew your website (this is called hosting and every single website that exists on the internet needs to be hosted by a company).

There is also Microsoft Frontpage. This looks like Microsoft Word and comes with some office packages and is a quick and easy way to design a sit with an editor that lets you see what everything looks like before you publish it.




Remember to include a few basic things when building your own site.

1. Home page
2. About page
3. Gallery Page
4. Contact Page

You can of course add more pages for different things but always keep things simple!