If you want to give a presentation of your artwork online which converts to sales, you need a portfolio website. This type of website is optimal for professionals in the niches of photography, digital art, creative writing, music and more. It may seem that creating an appealing and easy-to-browse portfolio website takes an expert. Well, indeed, powering a modern animated Continue Reading
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Nikon now lists its KeyMission action cameras as discontinued on its UK and Japan websites, a change first spotted by Nikon Rumors. The maker’s UK website lists the KeyMission 80 as “discontinued,” though neither the KeyMission 170 or 360 models show the same notice. The Nikon Japan website lists the KeyMission 360 as an “old product,” but doesn’t include the KeyMission 80 or 170 models under its discontinued action camera page.
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The Nikon USA website does not currently list any of the KeyMission cameras as discontinued and is still selling all three models. The Nikon UK website is still selling the KeyMission 360 model, but lists the 170 as out of stock and the 80 as discontinued. Existing inventory is still available to purchase through online retailers like B&H Photo.
We have reached out to Nikon for an official statement.
Via: Nikon Rumors
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
One of the joys of photography is sharing it with the world. Once upon a time, a photography portfolio was a collection of prints, but digital photography and the internet have changed everything. Photography portfolios these days come in many forms, and they are almost exclusively online.
So, do you need a portfolio, and how do you decide where to proudly display your photos for the world to see?
You may be asking why you need a portfolio at all. Maybe you’re happy keeping your photos to yourself and never sharing or printing them for anyone else to see? It’s your photography, and you can do what you like with it. But, there are a few benefits that only come from sharing your work, though.
A photography portfolio allows other people to see and enjoy your creations. I’m betting you love not only the process of creating images but also the final product. So why not let others appreciate your artwork too?
You will be driven to stretch yourself and work on improving your photography if you put it out there for others to see. This is often a quiet voice nudging you to try a new technique or take a workshop or develop your post-production skills. A portfolio opens your photography up to critique, which is a little daunting, but I’ve found it to be positive and helpful most of the time.
A portfolio is also necessary if you ever plan to sell your photography. This isn’t for everyone, and I wouldn’t recommend that this be your primary motivation, but it’s worth considering. You may not think you want to make money with your photography, or not yet at least, but if and when that time comes, you will be better prepared if you already have an online presence and portfolio.
The options for displaying your photography portfolio online can be a little overwhelming. A quick google search for “photography portfolio website” returns 48 million results. The first question you need to ask is whether a paid or free service is best for you? There are many options within each category, but they each have their pros and cons.
It’s also worth noting that “photography portfolio” doesn’t necessarily look how you expect. In fact, you may already have a portfolio online, you just aren’t thinking about it in that way yet. Let’s look at a few of the options and you’ll see what I mean.
If you’ve ever shared any of your photos online, whether on social media or on a photo-sharing website, then you already have an online portfolio. Although not generally considered portfolio websites, some social networks actually make great free portfolios.
Photo sharing websites are a great place to display your portfolio for free. They’re aimed more towards photographers than most social networks, so often include features that may assist you in using them as your primary portfolio.
Other than being free, the biggest advantage of free services is the volume of traffic. The larger websites are among the biggest on the internet, so the potential for people seeing your photos is far greater. With all these visitors and traffic comes community. The ability to engage with other users is a huge advantage in my opinion. They have become the modern camera club. They are places where you can not only find an audience for your work, but other photographers to inspire you and network with.
Free services are constantly pushing forward with new features and technology, so you get to be on the cutting edge. The regular updates can be frustrating at times, but I think the good far outweighs the bad in this regard.
These are also the places that you are likely to be found by buyers. One of my first magazine features was an image that was found on Flickr by a photo editor searching for a specific image to buy. Again, this isn’t for everyone, but something worth considering if you are wanting to sell your photos.
There are downsides to using a free service, though. The biggest one for me is that you are depending on someone else’s platform to build your portfolio. Their primary interest is profit, not making you rich or famous. They can and will change things whenever they like and you have no say in the matter. If they close down or are sold to a new owner, that can mean a lot of hard work goes down the drain.
You have little or no ability to customize your profile page, meaning you have no options for how your portfolio looks. This may not be something you’re concerned about, but it’s worth considering. Free services make money by either selling ads (social networks) or offering premium features to users (photo sharing sites). This is fine, as it keeps the service free for those who don’t want to pay, but it means you’ll miss out on some of the best features the service has to offer.
You’re probably already using one or more free portfolio services, or are at least aware of them. Let’s take a look at a few of the biggest ones and see if they’re right for you.
The photo-sharing website Flickr has been around forever and was one of the first places I began sharing my photography when I started out. With around 75 million users, it is a giant in the photo-sharing world. Flickr’s biggest strength lies in its communities. I have been involved with many Flickr groups where I have met lots of other photographers and learned a ton.
Flickr’s popularity has declined over the last few years as users have moved on to other things, and the Yahoo-owned website (recently acquired by SmugMug) hasn’t done itself any favors by being incredibly slow to innovate and keep up with the competition.That being said, it still has a thriving photography community and is worth considering.
Like many Flickr users, I abandoned ship when I discovered 500px, a newer photo sharing website that offered many of the same features but with a fresh new user experience. 500px also used an algorithm that meant you were far more likely to see amazing photography on its “popular” page. The standard of photography seemed higher, so it naturally attracted a lot of photographers.
500px has never reached the same volume of users as Flickr, with current numbers sitting around 12 million, but the service has added new features like communities and their “Marketplace”, which is essentially a way to license your images to sell as prints or stock.
500px has made headlines recently in the photography world after it was sold to VCG, the “Getty Images of China”. This has been a hugely controversial issue for 500px users, and there has been a mass exodus of previously loyal users. Don’t let that be the deciding factor for you, as 500px still has a lot to offer as far as free portfolio websites go.
You may think of Instagram as just another social network, but you might be surprised how many photographers are now using it as their primary portfolio.
I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that Instagram is currently the world’s number one photography app, and for good reason. People want to go where the masses are. With over 800 million users, there is no question as to whether it’s a place to consider sharing your portfolio.
Instagram can be used in many different ways, but if you choose to use it as a portfolio, you must learn to be selective about what you share. Try to resist the temptation to share every photo. Curate your feed well, and you will have a portfolio that will attract people to it. If you must share photos of your cat, try using Instagram’s awesome Stories feature.
Just like Instagram, Pinterest has grown into a social network with a massive number of users, and it has the added advantage of being heavily visual. It’s a great place to be able to share your portfolio with the potential of being seen by a large audience.
Pinterest allows you to create boards and then “pin” your photos to as many boards as you like. You can create a different board for each photography category or location, such as “Weddings” or “Australia”. You can even have a “Portfolio” board where you only pin your best photos.
Pinterest also allows you to pin web pages, so if you have a blog you can pin your posts. The ability for others to re-pin your pins to their own boards means your work can be seen by a lot more people. You can also create inspiration boards for re-pinning other photographers’ pins. With all these features, Pinterest is definitely worth considering as a place to share your photography portfolio for free.
When it comes to paid photography portfolio websites, there aren’t as many options, but the ones that are available give you pretty amazing bang for your buck. Most professional photographers use one of these services these days, but that doesn’t mean you have to be a professional to use one.
They all have a range of options that vary in cost and features, but if you are considering a paid service for your portfolio, I’m sure you can find something that will fit your budget and needs.
As with the free options, these services have their pros and cons. The biggest advantage, in my opinion, is the ability to customize how your portfolio looks and feels. You can change colors, layouts, text, logos, etc., all without needing to know how to code websites.
Most of them include unlimited storage for your photos, meaning you can upload as many high-resolution images as you want. This not only means you never have to delete another photo to make space for new ones, but you also have a copy of your photos backed up in the cloud.
The ability to sell your photos as prints or license them as stock directly from the website is a major attraction for many photographers. Each service’s e-commerce system works differently, but if this is a feature you want, you will find something that works for you. Some paid portfolio websites also allow you to deliver image files directly to clients, which works great if you’re a wedding or portrait photographer, or if you want to deliver files directly to a magazine, etc.
If you have a blog, some of these services will allow you to integrate your domain with your portfolio. For example, you can make your portfolio URL something like “portfolio.yourdomainname.com” rather than “yourname.photoshelter.com”. Visitors to your portfolio won’t even know that they’re on another website.
As you’re paying for premium features, there aren’t as many disadvantages of using a paid service. The main one is that they don’t have the social element that you get with photo-sharing sites or social networks. Getting your portfolio in front of eyeballs is a lot harder without the ability for viewers to engage with your work like they can on social media.
Although you have far more options to customize the way your portfolio appears, you’re still at the whim of the website that it is hosted on, and therefore how it functions. If you don’t like the features a website offers, it’s take-it-or-leave-it.
The following paid photography portfolio websites are by no means an exhaustive list, but these are some of the largest and most popular amongst photographers.
This is the first paid portfolio service I used for my own photography. PhotoShelter offers some of the best photography portfolios money can buy. Their websites look and work great, and their e-commerce features are second-to-none.
You can sell and license your photos directly through the website, and they even offer self-fulfilled printing if you want to print and ship images yourself. Although it’s one of the most expensive services, PhotoShelter is a solid option.
I switched from PhotoShelter to SmugMug a few years ago after running an experiment to see how the two big boys compared in terms of Google search traffic. SmugMug won hands-down, so I moved my portfolio over. The two are very comparable in terms of cost and features.
If you want a beautiful portfolio website that works well and offers unlimited storage, I would definitely consider SmugMug. They also offer a solid e-commerce system, although they let themselves down with their refusal to allow self-fulfilled printing, despite users requesting it for years.
I haven’t used Zenfolio personally, but from what I’ve seen and heard from other photographers, it’s a service worth considering. Their websites look great, although aren’t as customizable as the competition. Zenfolio is one of the more affordable services available, especially if you aren’t planning to sell your photos. It’s definitely, worth a look.
Editor’s note: I personally use Zenfolio (screenshot below) and have used their print fulfillment services for clients, as well as for file downloads. It all works seamlessly and you can set your own prices with the Pro or Advanced plans. So, I can add my recommendation for this service.
Zenfolio photography portfolio of Darlene Hildebrandt, dPS Managing Editor.
The last option sits somewhere between paid and free, and is yet another option to consider. If you want total freedom to customize and run your portfolio website however you want, you need your own self-hosted website.
The easiest way to do this is with an installation of WordPress on your own domain. It’s cheap and easy to set up with a service like BlueHost. Once it’s up and running, the options for your portfolio are endless. There are many free and paid gallery plugins, and if you want to sell your photos you can do it directly from your own website with a plugin like WooCommerce, all without having to pay anyone else a commission, so you get 100% of the profit.
If you have time (and are technology savvy) and you like to have total control over how things look and work, this is a great option. It does require a lot more user input, though, so be careful about rushing into it. If you prefer something that’s easier to set up and does most of the heavy lifting for you, one of the paid services is probably best.
With so many options, it’s hard to know which is best for you. The good news is that whatever you choose, nothing is permanent. I have used almost all of the services that I’ve mentioned in this article. They all worked for me at the time that I used them, and then I moved on when they no longer served my needs.
Try one or two of the free ones and see if you like them. If you think one of the paid services might be for you, they all offer free trials, so you don’t need to commit until you’re ready.
Whatever you decide, remember to have fun and don’t take it too seriously. Sharing your photos with the world can be one of the most enjoyable parts of photography. I would love to know about your experiences with portfolio websites. Have you used any of the websites mentioned? Are there any others you would recommend? Questions? Let me know in the comments area below.
The post Free Versus Paid Photography Portfolio Websites – Which is Best for You? appeared first on Digital Photography School.
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Adobe has introduced Adobe Portfolio, a website creation platform similar to Squarespace. Part of Creative Cloud, Adobe Portfolio is offered under three subscription tiers and aims to provide creatives and professionals with a simple way to showcase their work online.
The Adobe Portfolio service offers pre-made layouts, as well as customization options for website elements like the header, logo, navigation, background and footer. The designs are responsive, able to scale for various screen sizes and there’s an option for a personalized website URL. Features include galleries for showcasing content, password-protected pages and website analytics. Subscribers can also integrate a Behance account with Portfolio for seamless content syncing.
Adobe Portfolio is available to individuals under three Creative Cloud pricing tiers: $ 9.99 USD/month with included access to Photoshop CC and Lightroom CC, $ 19.99 USD/month with access to 20GB of cloud storage and one desktop app and $ 49.99 USD/month with access to all Adobe creative apps.
Via: Adobe Blog
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
In an earlier article (The Future of Photography Websites – Understanding and Adapting to Trends) on this topic, you can read about a couple of major trends in the web-design industry (as they relate to photo websites). Here’s a quick review:
Now we’re going to continue exploring many other important aspects you should take into consideration when building your photography website (whether it’s an online portfolio, a stock website, or centred around a photo blog). All combined, these notes should give you a more clear picture of how to build your photography website and steer towards a more successful photo business.
This is fairly obvious to see in the world around us, but what implications does it have on photography websites?
No need for me to dwell on this, but it’s hard to write an article on photography websites without mentioning Flash, and with good reason. I hope you’re in the position to skip this paragraph, but if you’re still using Flash, continue reading and consider making some changes soon.
Besides the well-known SEO limitations, Flash websites are slower, not compatible with Apple devices, harder to update, and can be almost entirely replaced today using modern HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript components (and surely surpassed in many aspects).
Many photographers are reporting that almost half of their website traffic comes from mobile users (smartphones and tablets), and we can expect this number to rise further.
So you can no longer afford not to have a mobile-friendly website. Google confirmed this by announcing they will now penalize non mobile-friendly sites. While this is just one of the many factors Google uses to rank websites, it’s a strong signal to take note of this issue.
This is especially important for photography websites where users interact with the site more (using slideshows, doing searches, buying images etc.) Slideshows and static images (along with the entire layout, of course) should automatically resize and adapt to any screen size.
To emphasize the importance of a mobile-friendly browsing experience, Google provides a free testing tool for your site and rewards responsive websites in mobile search results:
You can read about website performance in the first article, however, it’s worth mentioning here again. The load times of a website are even more important to mobile users (with mobile networks being somewhat slower and less reliable than home broadband connections).
Not only are more users coming online (and using more devices than ever before), but they’re also consuming a lot more content. This should come as no surprise, and it’s worth considering for its web-design implications. Since users want more content, here are some ways to help them out:
That means leveraging social media buttons on your website (even when you don’t have your own profiles on those specific social media sites), making it easy for people to recommend your images and pages.
Don’t neglect tweaking your site to display pretty permalinks: a page URL like this www.johndoe.com/?p=789 is much uglier than something like www.johndoe.com/gallery/great-description-here/. Besides the SEO implications, pretty permalinks are also important for people sharing your content: if a URL is more inviting, it will naturally get more shares and visits.
While everybody knows that blogs should frequently be updated, you need to refresh the rest of your website once in a while too.
You’re not making a good impression if your site is becoming stale after months of inactivity, and let’s not even talk about Google (who values fresh content as much as users do).
Email marketing is becoming huge these days. While everybody hates inbox clutter, getting unique and valuable content via email is always good. This is especially important if you have a photography blog. Sure, people can come to your site to check for new content (or subscribe to an RSS feed), but sending them content directly via email can be very effective.
The people who subscribe to your mailing list are already targeted; they’re interested in your content to start with,
and want to see more of it. You can look into tools like MailChimp (free for up to 2000 subscribers) and follow their best practices for creating, and managing your mailing list.
Remember we mentioned impatience. With things happening so fast online, people expect to be able to search for content if they can’t find what they’re looking for in a few clicks. It comes down (again) to how you organize your site structure (and having clear site navigation), but it’s also about providing metadata and search options where appropriate:
Okay, you have a photography site, so it’s supposed to be image-heavy and visually impressive. The homepage is sometimes a good place to do that, but throughout the site, you need to also have quality text content to provide context.
We’re not even attacking this point from an SEO perspective. It’s important to your users that you describe every piece of content you have:
Once again, this comes down to properly captioning and keywording your images, along with having an easy-to-find search functionality. This entire process is time-consuming, for sure, but you’ll reap the benefits in the long run. How you add all this searchable image IPTC metadata is also important and shouldn’t be taken lightly. Nobody will do a search on your site for “DSC0023”, so you need to provide real value to users that need to search, by describing your images for:
You can obviously write unlimited keywords for your images (sometimes overdoing it with all the possible synonyms), but it’s usually recommended to go for 10-20 keywords per image depending on the type of photography you do.
Once images are on your site and people are searching for them, be sure to also track those searches in Google Analytics to learn more about popular search queries (informing you about content demands). There are exceptions to this: simple portfolio websites (with just a small selection of best-of images) don’t really need a search functionality. For larger stock archives or anybody selling prints/licenses though, it’s a must.
If you have a popular blog on your site, a blog search option also comes in handy. Just make sure it doesn’t get into a fight for attention with the image search box – they need to be clearly separated. Choose whichever is most important to make prominent (like having an image search box in the header throughout the site, and a discreet blog search option in the blog sidebar only).
There’s obviously a huge buzz around SEO and how to rank higher for certain keywords. Google is always one step ahead, continually changing their algorithms to prevent any dishonest or spammy tactics. How do they do that? They constantly figure out how people make browsing choices, and turn those into ranking factors.
When writing SEO titles and meta descriptions, think about how they would look in search results, how to best encourage users to give you their clicks. Don’t just stuff them with keywords for Google’s sake.
For every main page on your website, ask yourself:
This change in mindset is the one thing that can set you apart and differentiate your photo website. Sure, there are many SEO-specific actions you need to take care of, but you should always go above and beyond in providing value to people. Do that, and it will be impossible not to rank well in search engines.
You probably can no longer build a successful business without some sort of social media presence. But you would be taking too many risks to only setup camp there, without building your own website. Social media companies can always get sold or shut down (acquisitions, natural life cycles, new competitors etc.), so you don’t really own your profiles there.
Whereas a website is an asset you can control, that you have copyright over. You’re interested in buying instead of just renting online real-estate. Social media sites are excellent marketing hubs, and they’ll always be there to drive business forward in one shape or another. But building your strong personal website should be the core of your focus.
With this in mind, it’s obviously important to leverage all the social media tools you have (by placing profile links and sharing buttons on your site). Use them as much as you want, just don’t rely solely on them, it’s more important to build your own online presence.
A lot of photographers these days are looking for hybrid solutions instead of having multiple separate sites. They want a place where they can blog, and showcase and sell their photos if they want. So it makes sense that some platforms are starting to offer that, and the days of having separate portfolio and blog sites are coming to an end.
Current established companies (like PhotoShelter or SmugMug) are getting strong competition from WordPress plugins like NextGen Gallery (with its Pro version) or WooCommerce (with its new Photography extension).
If you want to start selling prints/products, now is a good time. Since online sales keep growing, it’s natural to see many photographers shift (at least partially) from services to products, basically trying to build a passive income from their photography business. They do that through books, prints, courses, workshops, etc.
Change is the only constant. I won’t recommend you use any particular flat design elements, any colors or layouts because those are just like fashion trends. They come and go.
What is here to stay is simplicity. I can’t imagine a time when having a cluttered header area (with 10-12 menu items, six social media links, a search box and a subscribe box, all crowded together) will be in fashion. A clean website is not about using big fonts or a lot of white. It’s about prioritizing your business goals and the elements on your site.
Applying this mindset to the number of galleries you feature on your homepage or the products and services you offer is important. When visitors have fewer and more clear choices to make, they have a better browsing experience and are more likely to trust your website and keep coming back for more.
Along with part one of this article, this was an overview of the important web-design trends you should be aware of as a photographer.
Constant improvement is the only way to be successful with an online photography business. You know this to be true for your photo technique and composition skills (since you’re reading this on dPS, after all). The mindset can be applied to your online presence as well; it’s a continuous effort to get better and adapt to the industry.
Success does not depend on cool slideshows and flat designs. Sure, you have to make your photography website beautiful, and, therefore comply with the latest web design fashion trends sometimes, but not at the expense of helpfulness and clarity.
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Right off the bat, this is not an article about what background colors to use, what plugins to install, or other shallow web design fashion trends. Focusing blindly on bells and whistles (flat design, parallax scrolling, full-width page layouts) won’t actually make your photo website better. Sure, it might make it pretty, but it won’t necessarily be effective.
Getting the bigger picture and understanding the WHY behind web design trends will make you better equipped to build a successful photography business.
Having worked on over two hundred photography websites in the past few years, I’ve developed an eye for all the details that make up a great photo website and have recognized some important mindset shifts. My aim with this article is to give you a good overview of where the web design industry is heading (as it relates to photography websites), and how you can stay ahead of the curve.
Focusing on trends that truly matter allows you to then provide real value to your audience.
Web design trends are just a result of an ever-changing landscape. That’s why building your photography website should not be considered a one-time effort. It’s your responsibility to keep an eye on the industry and adapt as you go along.
So, what is driving all the web design changes in the photography industry, and what can you do about it?
The web design world is rapidly evolving in order to manage the Internet boom:
There were more than 3 billion (with a “b”) Internet users in 2014, representing 43% of the world’s population.
So if you think the Internet has grown in recent years, we have yet to reach the tipping point. Not to mention how fast and easy it is to create a new basic photo website these days, instead of just being a content consumer. Everybody is getting online, which is the obvious cause of many web design changes.
Let’s explore some strategies to differentiate your photo website and rise above the surface:
When the market becomes over-saturated, you’re somewhat forced to specialize in a smaller niche and become an expert in it. Your target audience will be smaller, but you’ll also be a better fit for their needs.
Niching down can usually be done through:
This also has a great impact on how you structure your website. Having a clear target audience in mind, allows you to craft your message and tailor your site’s landing pages better.
If a first-time visitor comes to your site and is greeted with 10+ galleries from completely separate photography domains, (s)he might start exploring some of them, but will surely be a little confused and ask “What is this photographer actually good at?”.
Besides having great images (which should be a constant focus in your career), your website is an important way to showcase your personality. Just like you’re trying to craft a unique style in your photos, you should also infuse your style into the way you build your website.
How do you do that?
Your words have a lot of power. What you write (and the tone you write in) can make a lot of difference:
Furthermore, it’s obviously not enough to use a great website template, thousands of other photographers might use the same one. The branding and design of your website are also important differentiators:
To dive deeper into how you can infuse personality into your website, look no further than this excellent article from Smashing Magazine: The Personality Layer.
Using free blogging platforms like blogger.com or wordpress.com (not to be confused with the self-hosted software from wordpress.org), you get what you pay for. I don’t want to sound harsh, because they’re useful to many people, but they’re targeted at beginners, so you also let out that impression when using them.
Using the right platform (like wordpress.org for your blog and/or PhotoShelter, Smugmug, or Zenfolio for your portfolio or archive, to give a few examples) allows you to build your site under your own terms, with SEO advantages and more design flexibility. But then you also have to pay attention to the theme or template you’re using on these platforms. Choosing a weak one (and not even customizing it in any way) makes your site very similar to many other ones out there.
Even if you’re not in the position to hire a professional web designer or developer, or you’re just starting out, it’s important to do a little research first and choose a strong theme as the foundation for your site.
Website of our own Gina Milica – dPS writer and ebook author
If using WordPress, one of the best places to look for quality themes is ThemeForest (this link automatically filters for the term “photography” in the WordPress category, sorted by bestsellers and does not use any referral code).
Once you have a theme, it’s worth browsing the theme demo, reading its documentation, and getting acquainted with all the various layouts and options it has – they’re building blocks from which you can build your own WordPress-based website.
You can tell a lot about a photographer’s personality from his website layout. Cluttered headers and overwhelming navigation can leave users confused and make them abandon the site (or at least browse to less important pages).
By letting go of clutter and focusing on quality over quantity, you can provide a better browsing experience for your users:
Notice I did not mention minimalism in particular, or using the now-popular flat design elements. Prioritizing your content and focusing on a clean design are key ingredients to being more successful with your site.
Your photo website should obviously showcase your work and let your personality shine, but it shouldn’t be built around what YOU like (as the website owner). Instead, you should embark on the long process of defining your target audience and figuring out their likes and needs:
Answering questions like this should, in time, create a strong new mindset for building a site that’s useful and appealing to your audience. What a great place to mention this quote from marketing expert Seth Godin:
“The only reason to build a website is to change someone. If you can’t tell me the change and you can’t tell me the someone, then you’re wasting your time.” – Seth Godin
The spread of broadband connections and mobile networks are changing the way we browse websites. No longer are people expecting to wait too long for a page to load, or to sit and read very long texts (except maybe for long-form articles like this one).
High-speed connections bring many benefits, but also impatience and superficiality (users not staying long enough on a site to dive deeper into a topic). This has a few important affects on the way you should build your online presence:
Google expects that too. Photography websites usually have a problem with site speed, due to the nature of the image-heavy pages which require more bandwidth and are slower to load. While using a quality hosting provider is obviously important, the three main performance factors are:
Quality content comes first, but a big chunk of users leave your site if it takes too long to load. As technologies advance, this performance expectation will only get stronger.
Make no mistake – with faster websites, users’ patience is also stretched thin. In this era of distractions and (false) multi-tasking, rarely do people sit for long periods of time on a single page. Even if they’re fond of your work, the social media feed in the other browser tab pulls them away from your site and back to their notifications. It is, therefore, important to create a smooth browsing experience:
Since people are so distracted these days, you might be thinking of grabbing their attention and making them stay on your site longer. But this can be done in both good and bad ways. You can either use annoying pop-ups and write bombastic words to trick them into staying, or you can instead create a clean and simple website that’s a joy to use.
When you visit a website and can quickly find what you’re looking for, you’re a happy reader and more likely to go there again. Don’t you also feel the same way when shopping in a neatly organized store? Whereas on websites where you’re wasting time searching or navigating, your frustration level might prevent you from ever going there again.
What are the main ways to create a great website experience, you ask?
The web design industry is evolving. It’s heading towards clarity and simplification, forced by the expanding number of websites out there.
There are many other aspects to take into consideration (the rise of mobile devices, higher content consumption rates, new browsing habits, SEO and social media implications, and many more), but they’re the topic of a future article here on dPS.
If you closely read all the points above, you’ll spot the common thread; helping your readers and always asking yourself how to make things better for them.
Focusing more on the quality of your work and on providing an honest and friendly browsing experience to your readers can go a long way.
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The post The Future of Photography Websites – Understanding and Adapting to Trends by Alex Vita appeared first on Digital Photography School.
How many social media websites do you upload photos to regularly? I have five – a Facebook page, my personal Facebook profile, Google+, Flickr and 500px. Some people have more. For photographers who want to get their work out there, this seems like a must. Yet it’s time consuming and, truth be told, an inefficient way of working.
If this is you, then you’ll be interested in new photo sharing website, Expojure. A startup based in Mumbai, it lets you upload the photos you want to share to a central Expojure account, arrange them in Collections, add keywords, titles, tags and descriptions, then upload them to as many as six photo sharing websites (the five listed above plus SmugMug).
I’ve been using Expojure for a few weeks now and I’m very impressed with the setup. The website is well-designed and easy to use. The layout is simple, doing exactly what most people will need it to, without adding unnecessary extras.
There’s also a plug-in for uploading photos to your Expojure account directly from Lightroom.
When you sign in to Expojure you’ll see a page that looks something like this – it is your Dashboard. If you’ve uploaded any photos to Expojure already, you will see them here. If not, you’re presented with the option to sign into the photo sharing accounts you wish to use. Just click the buttons to do so. Connected accounts are shown afterwards on the left.
Once you’ve connected to some photo sharing websites, it’s time to go to the Organizer and add photos. Uploaded photos are automatically placed in a new Collection. You can rename the Collection and add a description using the panel on the right. You can also move photos around between Collections.
You can add or amend details of individual photos by clicking on them and entering the new information on the right. If you haven’t already added a title, description, or tags now is your chance to do so.
Click the green Publish buttons in the bottom right corner to upload the photos. Expojure places all the photos in the Collection into a new Set on your selected website.
Every photo in the Collection is sent to the chosen website. If you want to upload a single image, you need to create a new Collection and add the chosen photo to that first.
Here’s a photo that I uploaded to Flickr. The title, description, EXIF data and tags have been successfully added. The only thing left to do is add the photo to any Groups or mark the location on the map.
If you click on the Settings tab at the top of the Expojure website page you can download a free plug-in for Lightroom. Use Plug-in manager to add it. It shows up in Lightroom’s Publish Services.
Once installed, you can create new Publish Collections containing photos to upload to your Expojure account. Lightroom uploads them when you press the Publish button. The images are held there until you log in and distribute them to your photo sharing websites.
At the time of writing Expojure is free to use, and has been since the service went live. However, at some point (most likely after this article has been written, but before it is published) Expojure is switching to a subscription model. There will still be a free account, which limits you to uploading 20 photos a week and connection to two social media accounts. Paid accounts retain unlimited photo uploads and unlimited social media accounts.
If you have a free 500px account, you will receive an error message when you upload photos to it. This is because free accounts don’t support Sets. However, your photos are still successfully uploaded to 500px, despite the error message.
Expojure will add more features, and more services to its supported photo sharing websites over the next few weeks. Some of these may be active by the time you read this article.
The only alternative to Expojure that I’m aware of is Lightroom’s Publish Services (please let us know in the comments if you know of any others). The benefit of Lightroom’s Publish Services is that it is free (once you own Lightroom). However it’s not as efficient or easy to use as Expojure and doesn’t support websites like Google+ out of the box (plug-ins are available for many photo sharing websites).
Expojure is a well thought out service that greatly simplifies the task of uploading photos to social media websites. If you find the process of adding images to multiple websites frustrating, then please take a look at Expojure’s website, you’ll be glad you did. The video posted at the top of the article gives you a good overview of how it works.
Which photo sharing accounts do you use and how do you manage them? Please let us know in the comments.
The Mastering Lightroom Collection
My Mastering Lightroom ebooks will help you get the most out of Lightroom 4 and Lightroom 5. They cover every aspect of the software from the Library module through to creating beautiful images in the Develop module. Click the link to learn more or buy.
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The post Upload Your Photos to Multiple Social Media Websites with Expojure by Andrew S. Gibson appeared first on Digital Photography School.
Modern web is focused on photographers. It is stated in devices more and more improving screen resolution. And especially with an introduction of Retina Display that brings the image quality to the forefront. Despite a wide range of photography-focused social networks available like Flickr, Tumblr, Pinterest, and even Instagram, a personal website still matters for photographers. It’s a private sphere Continue Reading
The post Welcome to the Future of Photography Websites with MotoCMS 3.0 appeared first on Photodoto.
Landscape and travel photography are closely intertwined with each other. Travel photography, as many sub-genres of art and photography are, is largely undefined and encompasses a wide range of people, locations, cultures and ideas, including landscape photography. Such kinds of photos express the feeling of time and place, its mood and atmosphere without geographic limitations. The borders between amateur and Continue Reading
The post 33 Inspiring Websites of Landscape & Travel Photographers appeared first on Photodoto.
Tell IE11 that banking, electronic mail, intranet, or other trusted websites should always allow pop-up windows to be shown.
By default, Internet Explorer 11 attempts to block all pop-up windows from appearing, assuming most pop-ups are nuisance advertisements you don’t want to see. There are cases, however, where you want pop-ups to show, and if you perform an action that initiates a pop-up, IE11 may ask if you want the site to let the pop-up window appear.
If you are performing online banking activities, reading electronic mail, or viewing sites on your corporate intranet, you may grow tired of seeing these warnings and just want the browser to allow pop-ups to always appear. You can configure Internet Explorer 11 to allow pop-ups on a site-by-site basis by doing the following:…
Read more at MalekTips.
New Computer and Technology Help and Tips – MalekTips.Com
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