Specialized Photography

A portfolio is the best way to showcase your work, skills and testimonials to employers, prospective clients and others. Technology has become an integrated part of the creative industry where writers, artists, photographers, graphics designers and film technicians use specialized software to bring out the best in their creations. Building an online portfolio is equally important to showcase your work and achieve better response and greater interest. An online portfolio is ideal for professional photographers as well as hobbyists, who can save a lot of time and effort involved in making physical copies or CDs.

It is not so difficult to create a photography website on your own. The best way to get started is to get your own website and starting building your online portfolio around it. A photography website design involves a combination of your photography skills plus exposure to web designing. However, for those who are not familiar with technical aspects of web design, there are simple free website building tools to help you get an outline of your website ready in minutes. For photographers there are specialized photography website design templates for photo gallery, albums and portfolios.

Creating an online portfolio is easy, but creating a successful portfolio requires meticulous planning, designing and execution to achieve your goals. To build a good portfolio it is important to follow the following four key principles as discussed below:

1. Identify Portfolio Goals:

It is important to articulate your goals in any business, and this is true for your portfolio too. You can have a vision or mission statement followed by a set of goals. If you find different portfolios serve different purposes you can create different sets of objectives for each portfolio, which for instance can be Sales Generation Portfolio, Freelancing Portfolio, Networking Portfolio, Personal/Hobby Oriented Portfolio, etc.

2. Design for Target Audience:

It is important to design keeping your target visitors and audience in mind. For corporate clients and customers from traditional industry backgrounds provide professional, formal and clean layouts without any fancy or edgy designs. Focus more on what your prospects want and cater to their needs, for instance a photographer specializing in corporate events will have a different audience compared to those of a fashion photographer. So the right choice of design for your website and portfolio is critical here.

3. Navigation:

This is high priority for your visitors and prospects because if they have difficulty in viewing your portfolio or browsing through your web pages, then it is a definite put off. Even if you manage to get thousands of visitors, poor navigation or design will pose huge obstacles in achieving your goals.

4. Planning & reviewing your Portfolio:

Your portfolio should be professionally managed and reviewed like any other client project. Since this is a showcase of your work, spend more time on planning, updating and reviewing your online web pages and components of your portfolio on a regular basis.

Following these tips for your online portfolio design would help you win more projects, build a strong client base and achieve your professional goals.