How To Build A Spectacular Photography Website With Squarespace
A great website is a must for every photographer. You may already be sharing your work via social media and specialist sites but it’s essential that you also have your own online gallery, where people can find out more about you and spend some time browsing your portfolio quickly and easily. It might seem simple, but there are a few things you need to remember as you plan and build your site.
(Jack Eames - www.jackeames.com)
Allie Astell is a keen iPhone photographer, and founder of approved and authorised Squarespace specialist web design agency Manage My Website. She and her team have worked with a range of extremely talented photographers to help them create well thought out, eye-catching online portfolios.
Squarespace is a template-driven, fully hosted, completely managed environment for creating and maintaining a website, and is used by amateur and professional photographers worldwide. The photography templates on offer are carefully considered and crafted to make your photos stand out on any device. If you’re considering building a website on the Squarespace platform, here are my top 10 tips.
1. Choose your template wisely
When choosing your template, Squarespace offer a variety that you can customise and each one has its own unique features and style. You can switch them at any time. Starting with one that's right for you will make designing your site easier, but if you decide a template doesn't meet your needs, you can preview a new one or switch completely without starting again.
Think about the general features you want on your site. Do you need space for lots of big images? Will you have 5 pages or 30 pages? How many items will be on the main navigation and does the template you’ve chosen allow for this? Are you going to be writing a blog? For further information, here’s the official Squarespace guide to choosing your template.
2. Clarify your requirements before you make a start
What is the main purpose of your website? Who would you like to attract? How do you plan to market the site once it’s launched? Will you or do you have social media or email marketing accounts already set up so that you can drive traffic to the site? Do you have a look and feel in mind? Are there certain colours and fonts that you prefer, or are there other sites that inspire you?
Thinking about these questions will help you get a feel for what you need to include. For example if you want agencies to see as much of your portfolio as possible, you’ll need lots of different galleries and an intuitive layout to make sure they can be accessed easily. But if you only want to display your latest work as a shop window, then you can go for something a lot more minimalist and simple.
(Hilary Moore - www.hilarymoorephoto.com)
3. Draw up your site plan
Think about how you'll organise each page to allow users to navigate around easily and intuitively and write down the main pages you will require, for example Home, About, Galleries (and their titles), Blog, Contact. Will there be any sub pages from these main ones? What type of content will go on each page?
Draw a sketch to clarify your site plan and map. It could be structured like a flow chart or you could create an outline with bulleted lists and indentations that indicate pages and sub-pages.
4. Get your content ready
It would be very beneficial if you prepared your content before starting to build your website. Think about what you’d like to say for information pages (these will be essential for SEO so think about your keywords), and be as concise as possible to make it easy for people browsing your site to find what they’re looking for.
Imagine that you’re a potential client – what would attract your attention when browsing a good photography website? What would make you keep looking and prevent you going elsewhere?
If you need inspiration, look at other websites, especially people who you admire, to get a feel for the type of wording and which parts of your portfolio you should be using.
But please never copy or plagiarize as for obvious reasons, this wouldn’t be best practice; also Google loves fresh content which hasn’t been seen anywhere else.
(Flock - www.weareflock.com)
5. Great photographs make a great website
Keep them crisp, and clear and only show your best work.
If you upload very large images to your site, it will slow down drastically and people probably won’t have the patience to stay while it loads. The solution is to optimise them before you upload them. Squarespace advise that you save your images at an absolute maximum of 2,500 pixels across, and 500KB. Preparing images involves reducing the physical size and file size, while still leaving the images looking good.
For file names make sure they’re appropriate for each specific image and only use letters, numbers, underscores, and hyphens. Other characters (like question marks, percent signs, and ampersands) may upload incorrectly or cause unexpected behaviour in photo galleries.
6. SEO - Site Description, Page Titles and Page Descriptions
Go to Setting/Website/Marketing and you’ll find a range of options to choose from.
Click on SEO and here you should describe your website in one or two short sentences. This description is used in the search results of search engines like Google.
Also go into your settings for each individual page of your website and make sure that you’ve completed the Page Titles and Descriptions for all of them.
You can ignore the Navigation Title as this is simply the words you’ve used for the main navigation on your site, however the Page Title will be read and displayed in Google search results, as will the Page Description. Keep both of them short and sweet, but informative enough to have a good impact on your SEO. Think of using your keywords naturally and effectively.
Each template uses Page Titles and Descriptions in a different way, so check your "Read Me" file in your Pages section for details about this.
7. Labeling images - Alt Tags (a.k.a the boring stuff)
This one can be time consuming but is good standard practice for all websites as it’s excellent for SEO if done properly. You need to consider people with their images turned off, slow internet connections, or sight problems who use screen readers. This text will display instead of the image. That means you should really describe each photograph, graphic or illustration on your website and make sure you include your keywords.
8. Set Image Focal Points
With focal points (the small grey circles that appear over images you're editing), you can control the focus area in your images.
In many cases, the system will crop an image so it fits neatly in your template or its container. When you move a focal point in an image, you reposition the image within its container and adjust what displays in the cropped area. For example you may want it to focus on someone's face, or another specific part of an image.
Simply go to the image you'd like to edit, and drag the small circle to the area you'd like to highlight to ensure it doesn't get cropped in the wrong place.
9. Facebook Object Debugger for sharing pages
Sometimes it's only after you've launched your website and want to tell the world that you realise Facebook is either picking up the wrong thumbnail, or no image at all.
The Facebook Open Graph Object Debugger is a free tool that allows you to preview and understand how your page will look when shared on Facebook. It also allows you to change its cache and force the changes you would like to make.
Enter the page URL you'd like to check and select 'Show existing scrape information'. At the bottom of the results you'll find a preview of what Facebook has recorded and how your post will be shared.
From there you can go back to your website to edit your image accordingly if it's cropped oddly and alter your page title and description if required.
At this stage, you can return to the Object Debugger and select 'Fetch new scrape information'. You may need to click the button a couple of times for a proper refresh of the page.
Note: Images shared on Facebook should be at least 200px × 200px. However, Facebook changes this frequently. If your image appears cropped, Squarespace recommend experimenting with image sizes for current best practices. For more help, visit Facebook's documentation.
(Steve Hoskins - www.stevehoskins.co.uk)
10. We’re here if you need us
If there’s something about your template that you’d like to change, for example how your galleries work, or if you’d like to add a different hover effect in certain areas, Manage My Website can help by using CSS and Javascript code.
We can also get involved on a consultancy basis as you build and launch your site, or we can create your website from scratch to save you the hassle.
Perhaps you’re trying to decide whether to use WordPress or Squarespace and are weighing up the pros and cons.
Whatever conundrum you’re trying to work out, just contact us for an informal chat.
If you need more Squarespace or social media advice, check out our blog and 20 Essential Checks To Make Before Launching Your Squarespace Website.
Good luck! You’re going to create the ultimate showcase for your portfolio.
www.managemywebsite.com
