Which Website is Best?
Wide, environmental photos of an animal sell more often to a larger variety of places than tightly framed photographs. If your subject is on the move, you always want your negative space to be placed in their direction of travel, and you want the foot closest to the camera to be the foot in motion. Photo and text by: Annalise Kaylor
Lately, we’ve received a lot of questions about photography websites and what platform is best for wildlife photographers. Just like cameras and lenses, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution that will work for every wildlife photographer.
Rather than name names, though I do list a few for you at the end of this article, I’d like to go over some of the features that you should consider when you look at where to host your work.
Custom Domain Names
If you haven’t already done so, make sure that you own (if possible) your name as the domain name of your website. I own annalisekaylor.com, for example, because my name is fairly unique and it was easy to purchase way back in the day. Jared, however, has a much more common name and the jaredlloyd.com domain name didn’t become available until sometime in 2022. Thus, he used jaredlloydphoto.com as an alternative. It still had his name in the URL, and now, that previous website just redirects to his new website.
Your name is what we call a “branded keyword,” meaning that it’s a big part of how people tend to find your business. Maybe someone saw your work for sale or on social media or met you in the field and Googles you. They are going to try and find you with your name. But, they are also likely to use some keywords around their search that narrow it down, as well. So it’s nice to have your brand name associated with other keywords like “wildlife photographer,” “ wildlife photography for sale,” etc. Whatever your target keywords are.
Having a website that allows you to use your own domain name adds to your professional appearance. Most of the platforms these days allow for that option, but I see a lot of photographers who never actually move that over on their platform. No gallery owner or photo editor wants to type something like “janedoephotos.zenfolio.com” into their browser and it looks terrible on marketing materials. It’s much easier to remember something custom without trying to remember which platform the photographer is on, as well.
A custom domain is not difficult to set up, and the cost is usually quite minimal. The longer you wait, the less likely it will be available. This is precisely why I bought domain names for my nieces and nephew when they were young - if they one day decide they need a website, I’ve already purchased them and can simply transfer them over. If not, at least I know that someone with the same name doesn’t have those domains.
Custom Email Addresses
When you buy a custom domain name, you’ll also get custom email addresses. This part of the service is almost always free with the domain, as well. You’ll receive instructions on how to set it up through the email program of your choice, like Outlook or Mail, or you can use a web-based platform.
While my email hosting is free, I pay a small monthly fee to have my .com email route through Gmail. It’s the interface I use most and am most comfortable with. Whatever you decide works best, it looks so much better when you’re sending out emails from your own domain versus something like yourname@ hotmail, gmail, yahoo, etc.
The other benefit is that you can have multiple email aliases with your domain. For example, I have several email addresses I use for different things:
legal@ is the email I use to communicate with copyright infringers and everything I do through that is written in the third person
hello@ is a generic email that I give out to people that I’d like to keep in touch with, but don’t want them to have my personal email address necessarily
newsletters@ is the alias I use when I sign up for email newsletters online. I use this so I can easily go into that Inbox to read and unsubscribe when I want to and it doesn’t clutter up my business email Inbox
You get the idea - a custom email allows you to do a lot more than you can with your other email and it helps keep your personal email less cluttered and distracting.
I personally use Dreamhost for my domains and hosting. I’ve been hosting with them for almost 22 years now and I’ve never had an outage, their customer support is fantastic. Other reputable places (and this is by no means exhaustive) are BlueHost, Hostgator, and inmotion.
User Experience - Yours and Theirs
Building your own website doesn’t have to mean pulling out your hair all the time. It may be intimidating at first, but there are now many platforms that do not require any special skills.
For years, I had a highly custom Wordpress-based website. While I loved it, the more scarce my time became, the more I didn’t want to work on it. It became frustrating to work on - not because the platform was deficient in any way (it’s one of the most popular and robust platforms in the world), but because I no longer had the time to maintain and update my website like I used to.
Similarly, because I hadn’t updated it in a while, it became a heavier lift when I wanted to add new bells and whistles to my own site. So, I switched platforms. You have to feel like your site is easy to maintain unless you hire someone else to maintain it for you.
On the flip side, there is the customer experience. If your goal is to sell prints or fine art, for example, then you want the buying process to be highly visual and seamless. I love PhotoShelter and it’s where I host my archives and private direct-to-client galleries, but I really loathed the user experience when clients tried to buy prints from me. A handful of my longtime clients wanted prints or wall art but weren’t sure how to navigate the site and “see” what they were ordering.
If licensing your work or going after direct-to-client sales is more of a priority, then the lackluster print-buying experience at PhotoShelter may not matter. That’s because they have, at least as far as I could find, the only easy platform for automated licensing and pricing guides. Their service has FotoQuote built into their licensing platform to help you price your rights-managed licensed images so they are competitive with the current market.
Other platforms (in my experience) are highly visual for customers and also have an automated sales process that make your website “feel” much more like a natural shopping experience. When a shopper is confused, it can shut down the entire sale. So look at website options from both the photographer and the client side and see if it meets expectations for both.
SEO
We’ve written about search engine optimization (SEO) before, but any good website should have an area where SEO is front and center. This is hardly the most fun part of building out your website, but it’s a key component to playing the long game.
At a minimum, the site should have the majority of these crucial SEO functions in place for you:
Page Title (e.g., Annalise Kaylor Photography - Wildlife Portfolio)
Image Title (e.g., Endangered Steller Sea Lions Kenai Fjords National Park)
Alt Text (e.g., A colony of endangered Steller sea lions basks on a large rock in the middle of the ocean in Kenai Fjords National Park, right outside of Seward, Alaska)
These areas of the website are all function over form. These sections are not the place for whimsy or artistic flair. These areas are specifically to help search engines understand your website content and categorize it appropriately. You can have a different Image Title in your SEO area than you do as your artistic image title. The SEO title is simply for the technical side and your website visitors will not see it.
I would like to point out that the Alt Text section is becoming more and more crucial. Maybe you’ve started to see some larger businesses and governmental organizations posting image descriptions on Facebook or Instagram. Or maybe you’ve hovered your mouse over a photo on a website and have seen a little description pop up. This is the alt text and it’s a major component to making your website accessible to visually impaired people. Their site readers will describe your images to them, so I personally try to make mine as accurate and interesting as possible. Outside of being more inclusive, and actually part of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance, it’s also becoming a much more important part of SEO rankings. Google and other engines are cracking down on websites that do not meet ADA standards.
If you’re writing captions and keywords in your IPTC metadata on your photos in Lightroom or a similar program, most online services will automatically pull that into their system when you build a website with them. If not, it’s easy to cut and paste what you’ve already written, making this section less arduous if you’ve already done the work.
How Your Portfolio Displays
Outside of anything else, your website is your portfolio. A one-stop shop for all things you and your photography. Whatever website you use needs to be representative of you and your brand as a photographer and artist. If no one has met you before, this area of your website should give them a solid feeling of who you are, what your style of photography is like, and what you are capable of creating.
Most turn-key photo sites offer an easy option for galleries and portfolio displays making this part easy. In fact, I think one of the challenging parts is deciding exactly which template you’d like to use. Some of them have so many options, it can be tough to narrow them down. Others have some features in one template that you like, but not all of them.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a website service that isn’t optimized for mobile devices these days, but as you look through templates and design ideas for your own work, make sure you check out how it will look on phones and tablets, too.
Your Overall Website Strategy
These items are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to your overall website choice. Only you know which tools and features align with your business goals and your strategy for selling your work. For example, we didn’t even dive into blogging options (great for SEO), newsletter and email signups (great for marketing), or any of the other ancillary features. So as you think through what kind of website is best for you, consider some of those options, too.
Both Jared and I are constantly asked which platforms people should look at first to decide. Below is a list of photographer-specific website options that are intuitive and simple. You can usually get a domain and hosting all in one, for example, and you likely only have to upload and tweak a bit. They make launching a website as easy as it gets.
All of them have different features and benefits, and they’re all personal to our own needs, much like our camera systems and why we chose them. If you don’t have a website yet or if you’re looking to change it up, this is the list I recommend you begin with:
PhotoShelter
SmugMug
Zenfolio
Squarespace (Jared’s site is on this platform, and Going Pro is also hosted on Squarespace)
Adobe Portfolio (free with your Creative Cloud license)
Format (Annalise uses Format for her website)
Picspa
Pic-time
Weebly