165 design references

Give your photography a focused home

@reggiebphoto and @vsco on Instagram

A photography site is easier to trust when three things are in the open: who you are, how to reach you, and a short set of pictures of the work you want. The pictures do not say that by themselves.

What to look at

The cover is a blue car and flowers under PHOTOGRAPHY WEBSITE 101. Cards 2 and 3 name three jobs: About, Connect, Portfolio. One page for Reggie Ballesteros then repeats, with a red box on the part that card is teaching. About boxes a short bio: engineer turned photographer, Vallejo, a mission to teach one million people. Three cards ask for the path, the kind of work, and what is next. Connect boxes his face and San Francisco, CA, then asks for a portrait, a city, and contact that is easy to find. Portfolio is four car-and-flower pictures, then a handful instead of a hundred, and only the work you want to be hired for. The end says keep it simple.

The About card boxes the bio on the live page: name, two sentences, then email, city, what he is available for, and the kinds of pictures.
The About card boxes the bio on the live page: name, two sentences, then email, city, what he is available for, and the kinds of pictures.
The portfolio card shows four frames that share cars, flowers, and a double exposure, instead of a long gallery.
The portfolio card shows four frames that share cars, flowers, and a double exposure, instead of a long gallery.

Why it works

Nielsen Norman Group's About Us studies, with more than 70 people, found that visitors often cannot tell what an organization does when the page assumes they already know, and that plain language, a real photograph, and a way to reach a person are what made a company feel worth contacting. That is the job of the bio, the portrait, and the email and city on this page. Their eyetracking found that people study pictures of real people and of the thing they are judging, and skip decorative filler, and a later note on imagery says a set is easier to read when the pictures share a look. That is a portrait plus four matching frames, not every shoot. Their Contact Us research found that people expect an email and a place, and that a form with no direct address makes the company seem unwilling to be reached.

Try it

  1. Keep the navigation to three labels: About, the work, and a way to write you.
  2. Open About with where you came from and what you photograph, in plain sentences. Do not leave that job to the pictures.
  3. Put your face, your city, and a real email on that same screen, not only inside a form.
  4. This week, remove every picture that is not the job you want next.
  5. Use one treatment across the set, the way these four frames share cars, flowers, and a double exposure.

What it costs

Nielsen Norman Group found that hiding a phone number makes a company seem unwilling to be reached, and the About page checked today prints an email and San Francisco, CA, and no phone. A short portfolio also fails if those pictures are not the jobs you want, because people hire what they can see. The same group says to aim for a page near 1 to 2MB, and the live Selects images are requested at 3840 pixels wide, so a handful of large files can still be slow. The card's claim that a clear site will perform better was not tested. The hundred-photo line is the card's number, not a study result.

Words worth knowing

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