What is the best way to build a photography website to showcase your work? Is putting a slideshow on a hosting plan good enough? How about using Wix or Weebly?
Do you want a beautiful website like this?
Here is a typical question we hear often from our website design clients:
I ended up using Photobucket! Also, I have Aleo 3D Flash Slide Show Creator but I do not like the quality it produces. So basically I have a “Photo Gallery” tab on my site, and I want a FAST, exciting, and clean way to put all my albums and photos on my site!
It is not your fault you got confused about how to build your website. Building a website using slide shows or standalone software like Show Creator or even Adobe Dreamweaver can be tedious. Using free software like Photobucket also has many limitations. You probably already know that choosing the wrong website development plan can be detrimental to your business. You should look to build a website to stand out from the crowd.
Avoid Free Hosting!
It is natural for a photographer to create his own photography website or portfolio site to showcase his or her photos. The problem with a free photo hosting sites is their limitations, and won’t provide the user its own customization needed. On the other hand, with a self-hosted photography website, the user has the freedom to customize the layout and designs of his portfolio sites while at the same time creating his own branding. Websites created using free solutions also does not stand out and looks like a typical or cheap website made by a teenager.
Many photo enthusiast are not familiar with the best solution or plan to follow. This post will show you how to build your own beautiful photography website.
Photography Website Development Plan
1. Get a Domain name
2. Get a Web Hosting Account
3. Use WordPress to Create Your Photography Website
4. Build the website, preferably using a stunning custom template
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Get a Domain Name.
Your domain name is responsible for the unique identification of your website so that your audience can locate you online. It could be related to your company or hobby or what ever domain name you want as long as it is readily available and not brand name. Domain price generally around $ 9-$ 12. You can start your search at any best domain registrar such as Godaddy or Namecheap.
Once you have your recently registered domain name, you are ready use it when registering for a new hosting company when request for a domain name. Just change the nameservers of your domain name to be pointing to your web host. Domain propagation might take 2-48 hours.
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Get a Web Hosting Account.
Since you have your domain name, it is time to decide upon your web hosting account. Identify thoroughly your web hosting requirements regardless of whether you need free hosting, dedicated hosting, shared hosting, virtual private server(vps) hosting or perhaps a reseller hosting. But since it is your first website, you can start with a shared hosting plan.
Nevertheless, prior to signing up to any web hosting provider, you have to review first their abilities and reputations. Pick the one that excels in website hosting features offered, plenty of freebies, A+ BBB score, responsive and educated customer support, good review, includes a money back guarantee and many of all offers high quality hosting service at an affordable price.
Best Hosting or Your Website
Many experienced web developers use Hostgator. If need a quality hosting plan, website experts usually recommend going with Hostgator because they are the best best domain host in the world today.
The Hostgator reviews will tell you that HG has an amazingly long, 45 days money back guarantee so you have ample time to test them out. They are rated A+ by Better Business Bureau which shows their commitment to customer satisfaction. You also do not have to pay for the first month. You can just try their fully functional hosting service – you pay only $ 0.01 (you need to use the exclusive coupon). Do you know any other hosting company that believe in themselves so much they can give you that kind of assurance? Anybody can grab an account from Hostgator for almost FREE.
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Use WordPress in Creating Your Photography Website
After you have your domain name and web hosting company, it is time to decide the platform of your photography website. It is highly suggested to use WordPress since it has powerful and elegant photography themes and plugins that you can use. Aside from the fact that, WordPress can be easily installed via one-click installer like Fantastico and QuickInstall that can be found in cPanel.
Best Photography Website Templates
Below are 3 top photography themes that you can use:
- PhotoPro – is exactly what it sounds like…a professionally developed WordPress theme for photographers. The theme’s main focus is providing you with a great canvas for showcasing your work. The minimal design, combined with some great jQuery effects and unique layouts are sure to make your site stand out from the crowd and captivate your visitors attention.
- Titan – designed to look great on every desktop browsers as well as in tables and mobile devices. The theme has built-in gallery and portfolio modules supporting many type including images, videos and custom HTML.
- Exposed – a powerful Photography and Portfolio WordPress Theme which is best suited for photographers and creatives who use portfolios to showcase their work. Exposed come with our SmoothThemes Framework that include a Smart Drag & Drop Page Builder, shortcodes, custom widget, fonts selector to help you easily customize your theme without any coding.
Now that you know the steps, all you have to do is start!
Answer: If you want to showcase your photos, what you need is a website. A content management system like Wordpess can cater your needs. Although it is also for blogging, but they also have themes and plugins specifically for showcasing photos.
