For today’s most successful photographers, a high-quality online portfolio is essential.
Portfolio websites drive home an emotional point about photography services. They help brides and grooms select the right person to record the most important day of their lives. They help executives decide how their products and services should look to prospective customers.
Experienced professionals and amateurs alike spend considerable time and energy curating their photography portfolios. In today’s hyper-competitive digital landscape, a compelling, image-heavy website is a must-have.
The better and more professional your portfolio is, the better positioned you are to earn higher rates more frequently. Investing in a fully-featured photography portfolio website pays for itself in time.
Your photography website should impress potential clients with stunning visual templates, attractive galleries, and useful third-party integrations. It should have enough speed and storage space for you to show visitors full-sized images quickly.
Your website is the official face of your business. If you equip it with dynamic online tools, you can control your brand and improve your reputation considerably.
So what’s the best way to build a great photography website?
Introducing Elementor: The Professional Photographer’s Website Builder
Elementor is a powerful website builder designed for non-technical creatives like professional photographers and visual artists. It runs on the world’s most popular content management system, WordPress, and requires zero coding.
You don’t have to be a web developer to make a stunningly visual website with Elementor. You have all the tools you need directly in the platform’s intuitive user interface.
This makes Elementor useful for anyone, but it’s a true game-changer for professional photographers. Instead of spending thousands of dollars hiring a developer to create a fully-featured website, you can quickly and easily make your own – for free!
That’s right, you can get started with Elementor without paying anything at all. Once your website is earning you sales and commissions, you can upgrade to a paid subscription that will supercharge your marketing capabilities.
Elementor’s technology covers every step of the website creation process. Choose from over 300 widgets, dozens of templates, and even comprehensive full website kits to make your portfolio website stand out.
Elementor’s Core Features
Edit with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface
Every website builder needs a great editor. It must be powerful enough to create stunning websites, but simple enough for non-technical users to get. Elementor strikes the perfect balance, giving users a clean, clear editing environment with a drag-and-drop interface that takes no more than a few seconds to learn.
This is what you’ll use to build a navigation menu, call-to-action-buttons, and other principal website design elements. Pick the ones that match your aesthetic vision and show website visitors what your work truly is.
Here’s what the editor looks like:
You’ll see the widget panel on the left. This is where you can browse and select Elementor’s 90+ widgets. These are small, single-function tools that perform a single task or integration for your website. There are three basic kinds:
⦁ Basic widgets like Google Maps or Menu Anchor
⦁ Pro widgets like Animated Headline or Testimonial Carousel
⦁ Ecommerce widgets like Product Price Product Images, or Add To Cart
Create a brand-new website in a few clicks
For some photographers, the opportunity to create a unique website from scratch is too good to pass up. For others, the most important thing is getting a strong, fully functional website up as quickly as possible.
Elementor’s Full-Site Kits make that possible.
Elementor’s Kits Library is a repository of complete, designer-made website templates that include all the features and functionalities you need to create your website in minutes. Customize and configure your kit, hit Publish, and you’re done.
Photographers can use Elementor’s kits to create a professionally designed website that instantly matches their work aesthetic.
There’s no need to work on individual page attributes like headers, footers, and color palettes on an individual basis. You have everything you need embedded in the kit. It’s guaranteed to work the moment you publish it.
How to Use the Elementor Kits Library
Build an e-commerce empire
Many photography websites are basically digital brochures. They help photographers capture peoples’ attention and hopefully convince a few of them to request commissions.
That’s a great tool for the budding professional photographer, but professional websites can do much more than that. With a bit of work, you can create a full-featured e-commerce site that brings revenue in all on its own.
Elementor’s e-commerce website builder leverages the power of WooCommerce, one of the most popular ecommerce plugins on WordPress. This platform powers millions of online stores, including professional photography websites selling digital images, printed posters, framed prints, and more.
With WooCommerce powering your Elementor-built photography website, you can optimize every aspect of the customer experience. Create custom buttons for add-to-cart functionality and build unique menus banners that speak to your audience. Add customer reviews and leverage upselling features that drive revenue generation.
Elementor’s top e-commerce widgets have everything you need to build an online photography business. Take a look for yourself:
Start marketing the smart way
Whether you plan on selling individual images or not, digital marketing technology is essential for turning your website into its own source of revenue.
Elementor gives you the power to display promotional materials to visitors at key, strategic moments.
Use Elementor’s advanced pop-up builder to capture leads and expand your customer base. Offer special discounts and deals during busy holiday periods and make sure website visitors see those deals.
Elementor is a great platform for leveraging and integrating multiple digital marketing tools so you can boost conversions, generate leads, and analyze customer behaviors. Some of the valuable integrations you can use include:
⦁ Social media platform integrations: (Facebook, Discord, Soundcloud, YouTube)
⦁ Marketing and CRM platform integrations: (Mailchimp, AWeber, Zapier, Getresponse, Drip)
⦁ WordPress plugins: (Yoast, Toolset, RankMath)
Optimize your workflow
A great workflow ensures you waste as little time as possible creating and managing your photography website. You need to be able to make changes quickly, with consistent, predictable results every time.
Elementor Pro’s Global Settings feature prevents you from spending hours configuring individual web pages. Instead, you can set a global standard that all of your web pages follow. When you update Global Settings, Elementor Pro pushes those updates to all of your web pages automatically.
Of course, you can also separate certain pages from the Global Settings standard. You can customize any element of any page on its own, without impacting other pages.
Elementor Free Vs Elementor Pro
Most website builders are either free or paid. Elementor is one of the few that offers a free plan along with multiple paid subscription options.
With the free version, you have access to unlimited design possibilities. Elementor Pro gives you professional tools that help speed up your workflow and enable valuable website features you can use to build your business.
You can create a stunning, professional website with Elementor’s free plan. If you want to use Elementor’s photography-specific Full-Site Kits and add e-commerce functionality to your website, you’ll need to upgrade to a subscription plan.
Elementor’s first-tier subscription plan starts at $49 per year and is perfect for the professional photographer who wants to make the most of their work online.
Jumpstart Your Digital Photography Career Now!
Creating your own digital photography website does not have to be a challenge, and it certainly doesn’t have to cost thousands of dollars. Not with Elementor at your disposal.
Elementor will help you create the perfect photography website for launching your digital presence and augmenting your photography career. Whether you want a simple portfolio website or a fully-featured e-commerce solution, Elementor will help you create it without writing a single line of code.
Join Elementor’s community of more than 8 million professionals using the most powerful website builder on WordPress to capture leads and generate revenue today. You can get started with Elementor’s free version in less than a few minutes – all you have to do is install it from WordPress.org.
