A photographer website that's fast, focused, and fair to your clients

What clients look for in a photographer

• Work in their kind of shoot. A wedding couple wants weddings, a company wants headshots. A focused portfolio beats a mix of everything.
• A price to start from. Photographers debate this endlessly, but "starting at" prices or package ranges are common practice, and Format argues that without any price many people don't bother to ask (Format).
• What they get: how many edited photos, how soon, how they're delivered, print or usage rights, travel costs, the deposit.
• Whether you're free on their date, and who you are: a real photo of you and a few honest lines.
• Reviews from people who had the same kind of shoot.

The sections a photographer's website needs

1. Top of the page: your genre and area, and Check my availability.
2. Portfolio, by genre: your best work, a tight selection, each photo with a description.
3. Packages or starting prices, and what's included.
4. How it works: enquiry, contract and deposit, the shoot, the gallery and when it arrives.
5. About you.
6. Reviews.
7. An enquiry form with the date, the type of shoot, the place and a budget range.

Mistakes we see on photographers' websites

• Huge images that make the site slow, the most common technical problem. Phones on mobile data give up.
• No prices anywhere.
• Every genre mixed together.
• Client galleries on public pages that Google can index.
• No date field in the enquiry form.
• Right-click blocking scripts that break the site on phones without protecting anything.

Permission to publish

In the EU and UK, photos of identifiable people are personal data. Publishing them online, in your portfolio or blog, generally needs a lawful basis, which in practice means the client's consent to publication; take particular care with children, where you need the parents' consent. Put the permission in your contract or booking form, and keep private galleries password-protected and out of search engines. This is general information, not legal advice. Copyright stays with you unless your contract says otherwise, so say plainly what usage or print rights clients get.

Getting found locally

Choose the most specific Google Business Profile category that fits ("Wedding photographer", "Portrait studio"). If you work at clients' places, set up as a service-area business. Schema.org has no photographer type, so in structured data you're a LocalBusiness with the areas you serve. If you license photos, Google Images can show a "Licensable" badge when you add licence information to them (image licence metadata).

How it works with Ginta

Four words were enough for the example above. Ginta-made pages are built to be fast: photos you upload in the builder are compressed to WebP (about 1,600 px) in your browser before they go up, every image gets its size so the page doesn't jump, and photos further down load as the visitor scrolls, so a portfolio doesn't cost you the visitor on a phone. Add a Gallery with albums that each get their own page, uploaded and ordered by you; add Quote requests so enquiries arrive with the date, the type of shoot and photos of the venue; and a Blog for full wedding stories, each post with its own page Google can find.