A photographer's website is their calling card and one of the most crucial aspects of their business. As such, it is important to carefully consider every aspect of yours. This excellent video discusses three ways you might be going wrong with your website.
Coming to you from John Branch IV Photography, this helpful video discusses three mistakes you might be making with your photography website. One particularly common issue I see is not checking that your site is optimized well for mobile devices. A ton of people do the majority of their browsing on their phones or tablets nowadays, and with the expectation of quickly loading sites and well organized mobile designs, it can be very easy to lose a potential client if your mobile site does not provide an efficient and good experience. Thankfully, most design tools and applications have built-in simulation tools for checking how your site will look on a phone or tablet before you even export and upload it, making it easy to check this. Also, be sure that your image file sizes are not too big, as mobile data speeds are not always particularly quick. Check out the video above for more and a lot of helpful advice.
The problem with photo blogs is the constant reposting of other people’s content videos. Shameless.
Especially since not everyone has an unlimited data plan on their phone, and the description of the video amounts to clickbait.
You are aware this is a good thing for the content maker, right? It gets them additional views and spreads their content around. This isn't like say a photographer shooting for "exposure". The business model of YouTubers is literally to amass as many views as possible. When a major publication shares a video by a small channel, that channel enjoys a huge windfall of views and if the content is good a percent of those views will translate into new subs.
IMO that model is bad because it gives content creators incentive to produce low quality content at a faster pace so they can make more money and then that's all youtube will put on the front page. Buuuuut at the same time it does indeed get the views so I think that also says something about the viewers.
What model would you suggest as an alternative?
"Before wasting any time"..and keeps talking for two minutes more wasting my time.
Unfortunately, this is a reality though, it is why I stepped away from pro photography. Clients want to hire someone who is consistently delivering a predictable quality and style. I agree it is boring, but consistency is the heart of almost any business.
I too find is nauseating to think that the best decision I can make for my photography from a business point of view is to never deviate from a specific pattern.
You lost me at "curate", I'm a freelance photographer not an Art Gallery owner.
In my opinion the two biggest mistakes photographers make with their website is?:
1. They don't post big, high-quality images and instead resort to small images or thumbs.
2. They don't say where they are from. (Sorry folks, unless you are Erik Almas or Joe McNally or the like it doesn't make you seem successful by saying you are willing to travel anywhere. Most clients are not willing to pay for travel, they are looking for someone local. if you get to a point where you are utterly dominating your local market then think about going broader, until then it is just preventing clients from finding you)
I think the biggest problem with photography websites and channels is the constant "bla bla bla is sponsored by Squarespace"
the biggest problem of all photo community sites like fstoppers is their brazen shameless censorship against all critical comments.
and that drives people to create youtube-photoblogs, etc. simply out of despair o post what they want. (nevermind, there they get censores, deplatformed, cancelled as well)
good counsels like here: keep as uniform as you were before at fstoppers (e.g.) show exactly that pc mindset: boring, lying, fishung for compliments. it's 'capitalist realism' as we should call it: in communist dictatorship it ewas the party which imoosed style and manners. nowadays it's 'the market' - i.e. internet monopolists and assorted censors on all portals/communities/forums.
There are several critical comments above, none of them have been censored.
Censorship on Fstoppers? Can you give examples? FS is pretty lenient. One would have to be one hell of an asshole for them to censor them. Usually for consistently posting personal attacks.
I dunno man. I have made some pretty critical comments in the past (specifically about Adobe products) and I've never been censored.