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The Importance of Photography Web Hosting
The world wide web is no longer the sole domain of coders and programmers. Now that the Internet has slowly but surely gravitated towards being a more visual medium and photography web hosting has become an actual thing, photographers have started building their presence online, realizing just how much better the medium is at propping up their passion and making it easier for them to share their beautiful images with the rest of the world.
While there are already large social networking sites that are targeted towards photographers – such as Tumblr, Flickr, Pinterest, and Instagram, it is still vital that professional and aspiring photographers set up their own websites. However, the absolute freedom that comes with your own photography web hosting site also requires you to shoulder a few responsibilities, and to consider a few things first, such as:
Find a Hosting Service that Provides Ease of Use
If you’re building a website from scratch, you can take advantage of the many Content Managing Systems out there, such as WordPress, in order to ensure that you can update your site easily and upload your photos without getting bogged down by technical and coding stuff. If possible, you can hire a web developer or a coder who will handle the technical stuff while you provide the layout or design that you want.
Do Not Overwhelm Your Visitors
It is easy for photographers to get so caught up in the presentation that they forget the fact that it is very easy to overwhelm visitors – and potential clients – with too many high resolution images (that take too long to load and bog down even broadband connections). Learn how to be efficient in your presentation and be mindful of your readers’ attention span and hardware capabilities. If possible, trim down your images to a more manageable size and resolution (without sacrificing quality) then just offer the high resolution originals as a downloadable option.
Don’t Forget About Mobile Users
The web has changed so much over the past decade. And one of the biggest changes is that the number of mobile users has overtaken the number of people sitting behind a desktop computer. This means it will be foolish to simply ignore mobile users when you are designing your site. This doesn’t mean you have to create a drastically cut-down version of your site with thumbnails instead of decent sized pictures, as there are mobile devices these days have screens with resolutions higher than desktop PCs 5 years ago. But you do need to ensure that your site loads and looks well on a mobile device, including making sure that you’re not using any web standards or scripts that are unsupported (for example, a large number of Apple tablets have no support for Flash content).
Don’t Ignore Photography-Oriented Social Networks
It’s true that you have more control over your content and identity if you use your own photography web hosting instead of uploading your entire portfolio on Facebook or Flickr, but you’ll be missing out on a lot of exposure if you isolate yourself from social media. You can integrate these services on your site and take advantage of the built-in audience as well as the various promotional tools that they offer.
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