Essentials for a Successful Website

These days, everyone has a website and we think they're great. But how do you know exactly what your friends, family and fans are really thinking when they see it? And if you're a pro making money from your craft: Are you sure that your site is doing everything it can to get you clients and seal the deal? How much business are you losing from silly mistakes? After browsing tons of sites and hearing the advice from our marvelous team of Support Heroes, we've compiled a list of tips to help you get the best, most effective and appealing website you  possibly can. Period.

1. Your Contact Information

Omitting or hiding ways for people to reach you is a grave mistake, one that you may not even know you're making. Think it through: If someone finds your site and wants to talk with you, how would they do it? If you forget to include your contact information (or hide it several clicks deep), would you expect them to spend more than 5 minutes hunting for it before they give up? Chances are you don't even have that long before they move on. It's true that putting your email address or phone number out in public can be risky. But there are plenty of great ways to let your fans reach out to you without throwing the door open to everyone that walks by.

What you should do: 

First and foremost, have a way to contact you either at the top, bottom, or in the navigation bar of your website. Add your contact email address into your Profile. 

Now, take one further step to a professional look and hook  SmugMug's contact form to your nav menu with by choosing the pre-built contact link in the menu bar builder. 

2. Personality

Ivan Makarov's About page is a candid look at what drives his passion.

The great thing is that everyone has a website these days, including you. But the downside is... everyone has a website these days. How will you stand out? The answer is: Be yourself! You have a personality and it's completely unique. Use your witty language, goofy selfies or whatever it takes to show the world that you're way more than just another link on the web. Talk about what drives you and why you're so passionate about your work. They'll absolutely love meeting  you in your studio or your next gallery show.

What you should do:

It's hard to talk about yourself and it's even harder to weed out what strangers want to hear (vs what's TMI), but don't be afraid to browse through some of your favorite websites and see what sticks in your mind about their bios. And what doesn't.

3. Punctuality, Punctuation, Competence

Don't do this!

Nothing looks more sloppy than a super-slow website with broken images and dead links. Even if you aren't looking to make money through your website, you still want to look poised, polished, and perfect as any pro. Right? So do a regular audit of your site, click those links and update them regularly to make sure they work the first time, every time. When you're logged out of your site and viewing like a guest, what do you see?

What you should do:

On SmugMug, we already give you warp-speed page loads and unlimited traffic and sharing. So become as famous as you want. We can take it. Our Share button will generate handy share and embed links for all your photos, so you can be sure those images look beautiful every single time.

4. Simplicity

Your gorgeous photos may speak for themselves, but if your site's a mess the message will still get lost. K.I.S.S. When you have house guests you clean up, so extend the same courtesy to your online space. No one needs to see (or trip and fall into) the photographic equivalent of your laundry pile.

What you should do:

Curate a few examples of your very best work and make it easy to find via a slideshow, featured content on your homepage, or a straightforward link in your navigation bar. Similarly, create a clearly-labeled About page and a way for them to contact you. Love to archive? That's OK. Just keep the rest of your photos neatly organized, too, so leisurely browsers can find their way around.

5. Your Brand

Panic not, weekend warriors. Even if you're not a working professional, it's important - but easy! - to give your viewers a unified look and feel that translates to a cohesive experience. Yes it sounds markety, but simply using the same colors and font size from page to page can keep your fans feeling grounded and sure that you've got your stuff together. And you do, right? If you're a pro, having your company's name, logo and a simple set of colors can be all you need to say, "Yeah, I got it."

What you should do:

SmugMug makes it easier than ever to give your site a unified brand. Our pre-built designs have all of the details of color scheme, font and layout cooked right in. We've done the heavy lifting for you.

Personalize any of the designs by adding your own logo, change up the colors to match by changing the THEME, and optimize the page layout to best reflect your brand. Business Account owners can add order branding too. 

6. Your Services

Be clear about what services you offer, like Alastair Jolly does here. 

The key to making great sales is to do the thinking for potential customers so they don't have to. The most basic way to do this is to be crystal-spanking-clear about what your specialities are and which services you offer. Whether you shoot BMX, babies or brides, making it obvious in your brand and portfolio is the best (and most efficient) way to make sure that the right customers are finding you. After all, if you're a commercial fashion photographer, do you want to be fielding questions from the local high school sports team?

What you should do

Create a specific page on your site that lists out what services that you do offer, and give your fans a phone number, email address or other way to get in touch with you. There's no limit to the number or kind of pages that you can add to your SmugMug site, from your services and about pages to guestbooks, blogs and custom search pages. You are only limited by your imagination!

7. Your Best Work

People are looking to see just what you're made of, so this is your chance to sum it up and show it off. Curate a gallery that contains the best examples of what you do and keep it updated with fresh new photos as you take them. Choose images that really show that you love what you do, and show the full breadth of your abilities: Lighting, posing, serendipity, emotion... this is what people love to see! As an added bonus, you're choosing the clients and fans who resonate the most with what you do.

What you should do:

Take a swing through the photos that you remember best and that you think represent yourself. It can be hard, but you can always use Collect Photo to add a virtual copy to one gallery, then easily remove the ones that you don't think make the cut.

8. Your Location

The web is a wonderful thing and brings people near and far to your doorstep, but this can be a setback, too. For example, it's obvious to you that your town of Springfield is in New Jersey, but potential Googlers in Massachusetts, Illinois, Oregon and Missouri may not be so sympathetic. Be specific about the areas that you serve so that you'll score top search results by clients looking to hire locals like you.

What you should do:

If you talk about your location in your homepage or About page, be specific about the state or country where you're willing to work. You can also add those terms and keywords in your Account Settings > Discovery > Search section so that Google and other search engines pick you up ASAP.

9. Good Grammar

Need we say anything about this, really? Your website is a representation of you, right down to the words you'll use. Please be sure you make sense, you've put in the effort to have it proofread by someone else, and that everything looks as clean and polished as you are.

What you should do:

Write, edit, then get a second (or third, or fourth) opinion. Read the copy on your site out loud. Check your spelling. Sleep on it, then read it again. All the usual tricks of the trade will help you step back and get as much perspective as possible. The best part is that any- and everything is easily changed on your SmugMug site at any moment... so edit as much as you like! We hope that these 9 tips come in handy the next time you're spring cleaning your website. Got more great ideas for getting fans finding you? Please share!