Advice for Photographers on a Shoestring Budget

December 15, 2011

I sent the following advice to a photographer who needed a website on a shoestring budget.

Since I couldn’t help design the website, I sent some advice instead, and realized this may be useful for other photographers who need some web help, so here it is:

I think that there are many good photographer’s portfolio website solutions out there that are low cost or free.
i.e. You don’t need to hire a web designer and create it from scratch…
These sites excel at showing photos in a large format, and they make it easy to upload, categorize and manage photos.

Here are some photographer portfolio solutions I found out there – I haven’t “test driven” them, but at least took the time to list the pricing:

Wix, Free for basic features
http://www.wix.com

Zenfolio, $25/yr
http://www.zenfolio.com/

Big Black Bag, $8.99/mo for basic features
http://www.bigblackbag.com

Photoshelter, $9.99/mo
http://www.photoshelter.com

Clickbooq, $24/mo, iPad compatible
http://www.clickbooq.com

Social Network Suggestions:

You may be doing this already, but I recently read an article about how Facebook can generate great leads for your photography business:
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/11/how-a-photographer-generated-over-100000-through-facebook/

Here are the 10 good tips for photographers on Facebook:
http://www.digital-photography-school.com/facebook-for-photogs-10-ways-to-generate-business

“Social” photo websites
http://lightbox.com

Tumblr.com (free photo/blog site for creatives) is probably also excellent to have, just to generate buzz and traffic to your main site.
You can use Tumblr also as a “Photo Blog” and upload daily photos.

Flickr is awesome as a fun, inspirational tool to network with other photographers, but not a good business prospecting tool…

Hope this helps…

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