Your Very Own Photo Website

Dear Bubbles:
I’ve always wanted to have a website where I could share my photos someday, but I don’t know where to start. Can you help? Thanks.
Techno-challenged

Dear Techno-challenged:
You’re in luck! I’m an ex–software engineer who used to design web applications back when the internet made funny dial-up noises. Thanks to technology, what was once reserved for those with computer science degrees has become remarkably accessible. It may feel overwhelming, but do not fear! Creating a photography website is something almost anyone can do with curiosity, time, and some clicks of the mouse.

And I’d encourage it, too, for photographers—even if you don’t plan on selling your work from it. Having a website dedicated to your work allows you to showcase your creations in a quiet, thoughtful space where others can indulge in your personal expression at their own leisure outside the other internet noise, algorithm-driven feeds, and social media doomscrolling. Your own website can serve as a record of your creative progress as you explore the world through your own lens. It can also give all those images collecting dust on your hard drive a place to shine and inspire others.

So whaddya say we make today that someday for creating a basic website?!

Before diving in, it’s worth considering what you want to accomplish with your website—both right now and in the future. While your goal today might be as simple as creating a home for your favorite images, you may also want to leave room to grow into new work, projects, and other avenues. Here are some questions to ponder:

1. Who do you want to see your work? Are you sharing mostly for friends and family, fellow photographers, potential clients, or a broader audience? Who’s your target audience?
2. What do you want people to do on your site? Should they just view images, read stories, sign up for a newsletter, inquire about prints, or book photography sessions? Knowing how you want your audience to interact will help determine the website features you’ll need.
3. What is your current goal versus your future possibilities? Do you simply want a home for your favorite images now? Or can you see yourself expanding into things like selling your images, blogging, teaching, and/or other activities?
4. What story or feeling do you want your site to convey? Is it a simple gallery, a journal of experiences, or a professional portfolio? Something in between or different?
5. How much time and energy do you realistically want to invest? Are you hoping for something easy to maintain, or are you excited about a site that grows and evolves with you?

Once you understand what you need from a website, choosing a platform becomes far less intimidating.

But as you start matching your needs with available options, please, please, please don’t let this early stage in the process overwhelm you—and it’s very easy to get overwhelmed with all the possible functionality and paths when it comes to various websites. Don’t let the paradox of choice paralyze you. We don’t eat a whole pie all at once. We just eat a slice at a time. OK, OK, sometimes we maybe eat two slices…with ice cream…

Start simple. Start by looking for a good home that displays your images. You can always adjust later as your path unfolds. I’ve redesigned, rebuilt, and migrated my website countless times over the 20-plus years I’ve had one because my focus, services, and ideas continually evolve. That’s just the nature of the beast (especially if you’re growing as a human!).

Photo-centric sites like Flickr, 500px, Pixieset, and others let you showcase your images, but are more social/community sharing platforms than expandable websites. They’re great if you seek a lighter-weight, low-maintenance way to show off your image portfolios, but you’ll be more confined to their structure.

If you want more flexibility and room to grow, website-building platforms like Squarespace (which is what I use and love), Smugmug, Photoshelter (which I also use to host my photo galleries), Zenfolio, Adobe Portfolio, and Format are excellent options. They offer a great deal of design flexibility, permit multiple content options (like text and video), and often handle most of the super-techie, behind-the-scenes aspects for you like hosting, SSL certificates, and CSS templates. Additional sites like WordPress (which is what I use for this blog), Wix, and Substack make it easy to combine photos with words if you wish to write alongside your portfolio.

WordPress can get a little more complicated with various plugins, but most of these other platforms don’t require much, if any, technical knowledge or coding experience. These platforms offer WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) tools to help put together a website quickly and easily. Instead of writing thousands of lines of code and hoping you didn’t forget a semi-colon or a closing parenthesis somewhere—which is what we used to do 30 years ago—these tools allow you to drag and drop different visual elements onto a screen such that what you see on the screen is almost exactly what visitors see when visiting your site. It’s pure magic! No semi-colons or parentheses required!

Most of the platforms also now include “responsive web design” capabilities so your computer layout adjusts to the smaller screens of mobile devices automatically. That said, you’ll always want to double-check how your site looks on different devices.

I’ll admit, I don’t know everything about all the platforms out there right now, and they are ever-changing their functionality, templates, and pricing. I’d encourage you to do some of your own research once you figure out what you need from your website. Not only do these individual companies offer plenty of insight into their capabilities, but there are also plenty of YouTube videos to help get your started (with some promising to help you create a website in 10 minutes!) The thing is, there is no single right choice here. There are lots of right answers. The best platform is the one you are most comfortable with using and delivers to your expectations.

Once you’ve picked a platform to host your website, your website will get a unique, dedicated domain name (also called a “URL” which stands for a universal resource locator). Oftentimes platforms use their own branding in the URL. You might wish to link it to a custom personal domain like I did with my website even though it sits on Squarespace. My custom URL for my main website is www.colleenminiuk.com. This Dear Bubbles blog also has a custom domain name assigned (www.dearbubbles.com). Some of these platforms (like Squarespace and WordPress) will offer the ability to secure specialized domain names within their functionality. Others will require you to secure one from outside sources like GoDaddy or Name.com and then manually link it to your site. That’s a little more complicated but nothing a few DIY YouTube videos can’t help with.

Then, it’s on to designing your layout. At a bare minimum, a photography website should show a home page, a photo gallery, an “About Me” section, and a way to contact you. All this information could fall on a single scrolling page (which is now totally acceptable in web design…it wasn’t 30 years ago!) or on separate pages within your website. How you design your pages is up to you and the available templates within the platform you choose.

Which ever direction you go, keep it simple and clean. Style each page the same so that your visitors know they’re still on your site as they navigate through it. Make sure text across all your pages are consistent in size, type, and color (e.g. headings are formatted the same way; paragraph text is different than headings but formatted the same way). Avoid things like using a bunch of different font types, colors, crowded images, flashing graphics, automatically playing sound, and broken links.

When it comes to showing images, aggressively curate your collection. Fewer images are almost always better than more. If you cannot decide between frames, pick one—don’t upload all of them and let the viewer decide. It will exhaust, not impress, them. Ten to twenty strong photographs say far more than a hundred that you’re unsure about.

The beautiful thing about a website is it can evolve as you do. Upload the work you’re most proud of now knowing that in some time—say a year or two—you may take that work down to replace it with new images you’re proud of and are more representative of where you’re at in your journey today. Think of a website as a living creature continually amplifying your voice, not a static “one-and-done” effort.

If you have a substantial number of images, instead of having one big giant dump in a single gallery, you might consider grouping your images into meaningful collections or projects—by place, subject matter, themes, mood, etc. A sentence or two introducing each individual gallery will invite viewers to consider your way of perceiving the world.

Before uploading your images, you’ll need to do some prep work to make them web-friendly. Large images, like ones that are 300 dpi and in TIF or PSD formats (“print-ready”), will bog your page down from loading quickly. To avoid this, export your images to 72 dpi and save in JPG format before you upload to your galleries.

When it comes to background color on a photo website, black is often the go-to choice. It’s dramatic and can make images appear brighter and flashier. But what flatters photographs doesn’t always treat readers well. Light text on a black background is super hard on the eyes. If you plan to include more than a sentence or two of text on your pages, use a lighter background like off-white or middle grey where your images will still shine AND visitors can linger without getting eye fatigue. And that’s what we want visitors to do: linger in your beautiful work.

Adding a short “About the Artist” (call it whatever you wish) will help viewers connect more deeply with you and your work. Even just a few sentences about who you are, how you started with photography, what motivates your work, and what you hope to accomplish with your work can help them understand where you’re coming from. You could certainly add a resume, a list of accomplishments, background stories—anything goes. It’s literally about YOU, so put your personality into it and make it your own.

A contact page is worth including even if you’re not looking for work. People like knowing there’s a real human behind the images (especially in our AI-driven world…), and you might be surprised who reaches out.

As you grow as a photographer and artist, down the road, you might start to add on more pages related to a blog or journal, selling prints or books, offering services (like workshops), and more. Whatever you wish. It’s your space to create!

The best thing you can do is simply begin and start sorting all the details out one by one—even before you may feel fully ready to do so. If it’s something you truly wish to pursue, it’s OK for it to be imperfect and unfinished and unpolished but still very real and meaningful to you. Each step you take—defining the purpose for your site, choosing a platform, designing the layout, uploading your work, and penning a few sentences about your as an artist—moves you closer to sharing your vision with the world. Just like pie, take one bite at a time and enjoying the process. (And don’t forget the ice cream!)

If you already have a photography website, I’d love for you to share it in the comments. Seeing your website not only gives us all a chance to enjoy your work, but it can also serve as a real-world example and inspiration for others who are thinking about starting their own site.

If you don’t have a website yet, no worries! If you decide to create one, please come back and add it to the comments later so we can celebrate you. Sharing our creative spaces helps everyone learn, grow, and celebrate the beautiful ways we each see the world. I’d love to see what you come up with!

You got this, Techno-challenged and all who embark on this path. Go forth and create!

Be well, be brave, be wild!
~Bubbles

Have a question about photography, art, and/or the creative life? Looking for advice or inspiration? Send your question to Dear Bubbles at colleen@colleenminiuk.com to be possibly featured in a future column post. (If you’d prefer a different display name than your real first name, please include your preferred nickname in your note.

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