Spring ‘06 Hot Shot Sarah Small has a great website.
You’ve done the hard part: you make great photographs, you have folders full of images on your hard drive, piles of prints. Now it’s time to share your work with the world. The number one tip I have for Hey, Hot Shot! entrants is: have a website. “Have a great website” is what I actually mean, but “have a website,” any website, is a really good first step.
If you are entering a competition with an online-only application, then we already know that you have internet access. And, really, that is all you need to start a website to promote/present your work. One really simple way of putting your work online is Flickr. Flickr is a tool for sharing photos. You can sign up for an account, use their easy Uploader, and then organize your photos. You can present different projects in different sets and collections of sets. You can title your photos and provide descriptions. You can even choose privacy levels to protect who sees and doesn’t see your work.
Another well-designed and incredibly easy-to-navigate site for making sites is Tumblr. Sign up for a free Tumblr account and then post your all your photos. The templates are clean and the dashboard is so easy to use. For a blogging site, it is definitely photographer-friendly. I have a regular website and I also have a Tumblr; it’s that good.
Ready for something with a few more steps? Register a domain and program a website. Guides to web design are infinite, templates exist, and you could always either barter for design work or hire a great designer who gets what you’re going for. This option is not as scary as it sounds.
Buying a domain and programming it yourself leads to my second tip. I look through applications, I sat in the room as our fabulous panel screened submissions, I’ve talked to a million people who look at photographers’ websites, all of whom agree: do not use Adobe Flash. Flash has its uses, but your portfolio should not be one of them. To oversimplify: it is very, very annoying. Your photographs should be strong enough that I never need them to fly across the screen, or pop up, or dance.
My last tip is applicable to every website option above. Edit your work. Regardless of the platform you choose, the actual photographs and sequence of photographs is, by far, the most important thing. In a Hey, Hot Shot! application you choose three photos in a feat of editing that is difficult at best. On your website, show your stuff, but figure out how much to show. Try different numbers and arrangements. Think about the structure of work in terms of telling a story to your viewer. How much should you tell? Don’t give away too much, but be sure to tell the whole story. How many stories do you need to tell, or how many bodies of work do you want to showcase? What caption information is necessary? It’s important to think about the constraints of internet viewing as well. How many pages will someone scroll through, or how many thumbnails will someone open? Subtract a few from whatever number you first guess. Ask your friends where they really stopped clicking. Check your site stats to see what pages people look at, and spend the most time on. In an ideal world, you would edit your work in a way that promotes finishing it all.
There is more to website design, and to photographer’s websites, of course. I’m certainly not the authority. But some other quick tips: make your name and contact information clear, consider a bio, a c.v., a statement. Edit everything for grammar. Keep it simple. No flash!
