Thursday, January 13, 2011

How to get your photography website started

I am going back to my original intent of this blog.  I had originally planned this blog to act as a guide or journal for the hobbyist photographer to know what steps I have taken to get my business up and running.  Over the past couple years I have experienced a growth in my photography that I was hoping for but truly did not expect.

So, let's get to it.
Several people have asked a variety of questions about what steps I took to get started with an online presence. And how to really get noticed.  I will attempt to guide you through the process.

I first set up a flickr account.  That is a great way to establish an online gallery for potential clients to look at.  To some this may seem a little unprofessional, but you are on a budget and have to start somewhere.  If people like your photos they won't care if the photos are on flickr or a custom designed website that cost you $5000.00 to build.  Flickr may not be a custom website but it puts your work in front of virtually millions.  Then I stepped up things with a smugmug account.  This I still use for galleries and some print fulfillment.  Smugmug is a nice customizable option and is relatively inexpensive for unlimited storage of files.  These two options just didn't provide the personality that I wanted to portray.  I love flickr and smugmug and still use both for other reasons.  I use flickr for image critiques and the forums are useful. 

What next?  Well, this is where I had to do some trial and error.  I first tried out several of the website hosting sites for photographers.  I tried Big Black Bag, they were good and easy to use, which I loved.  However, it just wasn't right for me.  I finally decided on Wix.  They offer a very competitive price structure to fit most needs.  The one thing I don't like about wix is that the site is entirely flash based.  Thus making it a little light on the SEO functions.  However, What they lack in SEO the make up for in look and customization.  You will have a wix assigned url.  It will normally have your user name at the end of the url for example (www.wix.com/username).  You can stop there and still look great. I wanted more, I wanted my own url or domain for branding purposes.  I logged onto godaddy.com and check the availability of the domain I wanted and registered it through go daddy.  You have a few options when registering your domain You can pay for it for a year or get a discount for multiple years.  Once you have registered the domain, simply log back into your wix account and transfer the domain to your wix account. It will take some time to play around with the templates and once you are comfortable playing with the templates I encourage you to start one from scratch.

That covers the website now to get yourself noticed if you are serious.  Market, Market, Market.  I am a normally shy person so this has been tough for me but also fun at the same time.  It is a challenge for me to come up with different ways to get my website noticed..  I will cover some of those ways in my next post.  And of course you can always look around my website at timbarronphoto.com.