Professional Photo Websites for Free

Digital art and digital photography can and should be placed online. Unfortunately professional design services and website management software could cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Ugh! But what if I told you that you didn’t need any special software, that making a website could be surprisingly easy, and free, or only ten dollars a year?

There’s two web services that I recommend you use for creating high quality websites that feature your work for free. The first is Weebly.com, the second is Wordpress.com. 

I’ve created an example Weebly website at this link:   http://gregscheckler.weebly.com

Weebly.com is shockingly easy to use, has some good clean templates, and nice photo gallery functions. You could definitely use it as a professional website if you keep the design straightforward and direct.

Currently my professional website is driven using Wordpress: http://www.gregscheckler.com I get about 55,000 visitors per year at this website – much broader exposure than any other marketing venue that I currently use. I use 1and1.net, at a cost of about $10 per year, to register and own the domain name gregscheckler.com, and then have the free Wordpress website (http://gregscheckler.wordpress.com) automatically routed to the name gregscheckler.com.   Wordpress has a lot more functions than Weebly, and you should try it someday, but it's interface isn't as intuitive as Weebly's. 

So here's what to do for today's online project... create a Weebly website:

1.       Go to Weebly.com and sign up for a free Weebly account.

2.       Choose a name and Create a free website.

a.       the website name is probably best if it includes your name, since after all your name as an artist is the main way that people recognize you.

3.       Select an exceptionally clean, simple Template

a.       don’t select complex, hyper, or overly colorful templates or themes… the purpose here is to keep your audience focused on you as an artist and your artworks.
b.    if you select a theme with a large header or photo, customize it w/your own art.
c.     don't select any of the add-ons or teasers (don't pay for anything).

4.       Know that in Weebly, everything works basically by dragging and dropping design elements into the website.

a.       Remember, the goal here is to feature your photography.

b.      Click on 'Save' and on ‘Publish’ frequently to save your work

5.       Create these pages:

a.       Homepage

b.      About the Artist

c.       Announcements (use the ‘create new blog’ function for this one)

d.      Photography

6.       Make the ‘Homepage’ your front page and put a picture or slideshow on it.

7.       Make ‘Announcements’ into the blog page; here you will post announcements such as when you are in a show, when you’ve taken an interesting photo, etc.

8.       For now, write a sentence or two about yourself on the About the Artist page.

9.       Place gallery of photos on the Photography page (select 5 to 10 of your best photos, upload them, and follow directions for making an album in Weebly via their ‘multimedia’ menu)

10.   Click 'Publish' again, and then Post a link to your new website in the comments section of today's post here at gregscheckler.blogspot.com

One of the best parts about Wordpress and Weebly is that if you decide you don’t like the website, you can either change the template or theme and try a different design without losing any of the content that you’ve posted, or, you can easily delete the whole thing. It doesn’t cost anything but a little time to set it up, so you’ve lost no money.

The project is finished once you've posted your website to the comments. The next part of today's post is for reading (not doing...) 

So then what do you do with your new website, if you choose to keep using it?

Here’s one thing that a website is really good for… testing your advertising. The fact is that advertising in magazines, newspapers etc. can cost a lot of money. Photographers sometimes make a lot of money w/a decent ad. But it’s hard to figure out what ads will work well. And if you’re like me then you don’t want to spend $1,000 on an ad that doesn’t work. So, how do you test the market before sinking thousands of dollars into advertising? You use a website.

For example, if you want to see what kinds of your photos people really respond to and might consider buying, link your website through to a printing service (such as Redbubble.com) so that there’s products such as matted or framed prints that people can buy. Then create some low-cost Google Adwords or Facebook Ads. In fact by clicking around Weebly you may have seen that it can automatically synch with Google and Facebook ads – but you’d use ads to get people to go visit your website (not to post ads on your own website). Simply read the directions for ads at Google or Facebook to set your own budget and to test what kinds of imagery and wording people click on when they see your art – it’d cost a couple hundred dollars to reach thousands of people who are likely interested in your work, which is far better than spending the same money buying an untested print ad distributed to a lot of people who may have no interest in your work. Once you’ve figured out what online ads are working well for you, and once you’ve made some money, then maybe it’s time to branch out and use your market testing to create some excellent print ads. I won’t fool you into thinking this is easy… it isn’t. It’s hard to come up with effective ads that sell the art. And you probably shouldn’t aggressively market your photos until you’re 100% confident that they are excellent quality or at least good enough that you’ll be proud to sell them. The main idea here is that you can use your website to test the markets for the artistic photos that you’ve created. In other words the well-designed, free or extremely low-cost website, becomes the centerpiece of your basic advertising campaign.