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Common Photo Website Design Oversights |
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Written by Steve Smith
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Monday, 13 March 2006 |
 These days, as a professional or semi-pro photographer its almost a necessity to have a website in order to showcase your work. Even if you don't ever plan to sell your work or services through this website, it's a quick and convenient place to show prospective clients, agents or partners a little bit about yourself, your capabilities and your body of work. Sure, you can just point them to your portfolio on another site, such as one of your agencies, but that really doesn't show them what YOU are all about.
Myself, when I am looking to find out more about a prospective contributor, I always appreciate a well designed, intuitive website where I can get a good feel about whether a photographer will be a good fit. I like to see a selection of their best work, as well as a bio or something that gives me a feel as to their experience, their specific areas of expertise as well as something that tells me a bit about their personality. I am sure that many other agencies do the same thing. In fact, at least one I am aware of requires you to have a website before you will be accepted.
As I've gone through the hundreds (or maybe thousands) of different photo websites over the last few years there are always several things that keep popping up that I'd like to see changed. Naturally, this is just my opinion, however keep this in mind. I consider myself more knowledgeable than average when it comes to matters of web design and the internet in general. If I struggle with finding things or can't locate what I'm looking for, chances are the average web surfers won't be able to either. Here's a few things to keep in mind as you create a new site or consider retrofitting a current website.
1) Too much reliance on "Flash" or cool graphics. Don't get me wrong here, I like to see a fresh, cool looking intro, but to be honest sometimes these just go too far. While they look cool and they portray a modern, technical image sometimes its not that intuitive. Sites that do this well allow you to bypass the intro or select an alternate version of the site that is more traditional html. You should also be aware that if your home page is primarily Flash or JavaScript type animations its unlikely Google or other search engines will ever "spider" your site to any great degree.
2) The wrong mix of text and graphics. There is a balancing act here. Too much text and your site seems cluttered. Not enough and there isn't enough readable content for website visitors, both human and searchbot. A classic mistake (and one I've been guilty of in the past) is to plaster the homepage with a lot of information so that your visitors will see what they want to see. Not necessarily so in this age where people don't want to sift through a lot of irrelevant information to get what they want. A better approach is to post a "teaser" - one or two lines that summarize and then a link to more information somewhere else in your site.
3) Each page is titled the same. This is just pure laziness or lack of knowledge on the part of the web designer. They use a template to design the page and each one uses the same title tag, usually just the name of the site and some short tagline. Does each page contain the same content? No, so why title each page the same way? For example, if you have your online photo portfolio divided into categories, each category page should be titled as such.
4) Navigation oversights. Here's my second biggest pet peeve - I get 2 or three pages in and there's no obvious link back to the home page. Here's my biggest pet peeve - every time I click on a thumbnail or a link it tries to open a popup window and my various popup blockers all complain at me. At a minimum you should always have a link back to your home page from everywhere in the site. Don't rely on people having to use their back button to do it. The occasional popup or new window is OK as long as it can't be done effectively another way. Don't get carried away with these as they do get annoying.
5) Lack of copyright notice or watermark. Its amazing how the same people that sometimes complain about the declining prices of image licensing seem to not worry too much about protecting their own IP rights. By not visibly watermarking your images and/or posting a copyright notice on every page, you are asking for theft and losing a potential licensing opportunity, no matter how small.
6) Right Click inhibits done wrong. A lot of website employ these thinking that they protect their images from theft - they don't. There are ways around this and those intent on stealing your images know this. It also annoys potential customers who may want to save the images as a comp or simply get used to using the 'right click' menu for navigation or other things.
7) Excessive advertising. Unless your site is informational in nature and you get a high flow of traffic, posting ads of any type on your site is not justified in my opinion. In order to generate income from web advertising you need a lot of traffic. If you don't have that you are likely just upsetting potential customers, especially those annoying and deceptive popup type ads. Does this ring a bell "your computer clock is wrong, click here to fix it".
8) Bouncing, scrolling, blinking, rotating, flaming, fluorescent colored, etc text. So 1990's. Don't go there, trust me....
9) SHOUTING - ditto
The biggest thing to remember when designing a site: Understand who it is you want to attract, the message you want to leave with them and how you are going to make it as easy as possible for them to want to do business with you.
Got any more ideas or website pet peeves? Love to hear them.
(c) 2006 Steve Smith, World of Stock [Contact] [Bio]
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