In my last two articles in this series, I talked about planning your business needs then organizing the structure of your site to best meet those needs. Today, I’ll talk about making sure your site and your images look great.

The background color of your site is important. Neutral colors are usually best, which leaves white, black, and shades of grey. Because colors tend to appear more saturated and lively against a dark background than a lighter one, I usually recommend darker greys (but not black) for color photographers, on the other hand, I think white or light grey backgrounds look great with a lot of monochromatic work. Spend a little time experimenting with your own images and different background tones to see just how big a difference it makes.

Getting the color to appear correctly on your customer’s monitor is a challenge in itself, if you haven’t’ missed my article on saturation loss in JPEGs now would be a good time to read it. You’ll need to accept that, for now, you won’t have an hope of a consistent color rendition of your images across the web, but the ideas I presented in that article should help some.

Image size is another conundrum. It’s widely believed that computer monitors display images at 72 pixels per inch, but that’s rarely the case. In practice, I’ve owned laptops that have varied from from about 60 to over 200 ppi., making a 720 pixel-wide image anywhere from four to ten inches wide. If you want your images to display large, but not too large to fit on the screen, the best you can do is to find a size for the images you want to display big and detailed at a pixel resolution that is less than the size of your customers screens. With displays resolutions as low as 1024×768 still being used by about 20% of web users, you’ll need your own images to be no larger than about 800×600 (leaving some room for the web browser, etc.) if you want to be sure your image isn’t “too big to see” on your customer’s screen.

Where possible, stick with ubiquitous, standard web technologies. Tools like Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash could help you solve this problem by better handling scaling of your images, but I don’t recommend Flash, at least not yet. Many popular web-browsing devices (such as the iPhone) don’t support Macromedia Flash, many users have Flash disabled or have not yet installed it. Moreover, many ways of creating Flash sites (such as the galleries produced by Lightroom) can’t be configured to work with your site’s navigation.

Finally, edit ruthlessly. Think carefully about how many images you want up on your web site. As I write this, I’m all too aware that I have nearly five hundred images on my own web site. That’s too many. Most customers will never see more than a hundred of them. A careful selection of the very best of those (as subjective as that is) would help the site, and I plan to make that cut over the next few weeks.

This concludes this three-part series on designing your photo business web sites, if you have questions or comments on any of this drop me a line or leave a comment, I’d love to hear them. Thanks!

Last week I covered some of the basic strategic questions you need to answer for yourself before putting together a web site. This week, I’ll talk about making your web site usable. If you have a large web site, it’s very likely that most folks who come to it will never see more than a couple of pages. It’s essential that your customers find the information they need.

To start, take out a piece of paper and jot down a list of what information you’d like to include on your site. Minimally, you need some of your images, and contact information, but depending on your business and how you hope to use your web site as part of your business (as we described last week), you may want to include: news, reviews, perhaps a blog or links to other social networking sites, and/or a biography that explains who you are, what you do and why. Don’t include an item on this list until you have a clear understanding of how it fits into your business. For example:   “If a customer wants to place an order, they’ll need to contact me, so I’ll give them contact information.”

A few specifics:

• Bio (“About”) pages allow you to not only establish credentials (hey, look, I was in the Smithsonian) but also to communicate a sense of who you are. The two portraits on the page I linked to at my own bio help customers feel like they know who they’re doing business with.
• News, blogging, social information and the like are all good ways of keeping your customers coming back to a site. But IF you decide to put time-sensitive information on a site realize that it’s critically important that you keep it up to date. In writing this article I came across a photographer’s web site with an exhibition list in which the most recent show was in early 2006. Customers who come to that web site are going to assume that that photographer is out of business. It would have been better to leave that page out entirely.
• Links to offsite reviews of your work, articles you have published, and so on, are also great information to have on your site– but they come with a risk, a risk that your customers will leave your site and forget to come back! I’ve seen two basic approaches to dealing with this risk. The first is to get republishing rights from the place you got published, the other is to have external links create a new window to show in. Either works well.

How will your customers get to all those pages? Most web sites today make use of a navigation bar. This is essentially an outline of your site that’s visible and usable from any part of your web site to get you to any other. Navigation bars are usually found either along the left hand side or top of a site. Either can work fine, but I tend to recommend left-side navigation bars for anything but the simplest sites simply because it’s easier to make a long list work vertically than it is horizontally.

One final note: many tools for generating photo galleries (such as the Flash web generators in Lightroom) will not let you include your own navigation bar on the generated pages. Don’t use those, no matter how pretty they are. If a gallery page is going to trap your customers away from your navigation bar, you’re better off without it.

We’ll talk more about photo galleries and aesthetics in the next installment in this series.

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From the Editor: See Also
Photocrati’s Photography WordPress Themes
DSLRBlog’s Review of Photography Website Templates