Creating Your Own Photographic Web Site
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[This article was written in 2003. Since then, things have changed a bit. After reading this article, you may find it helpful to read this article, and read this article, too]
My History
I first set up a very primitive web site early in 1998, to hold a copy of an article on variable contrast printing that I wrote (and which was published in Photo Techniques. Prior to putting up the web site, I had faxed copies to people who wanted it. I set up the web site after paying $22 to fax the article to Munich.
The first version of the web site was hosted on the server provided by my ISP. There were two pages - a page with one of my photos, and the article. I tracked the traffic informally. Once the article was indexed by search engines (more on this later) the site got about 10-15 visits/day, about half of which actually viewed my photo (about 3300 visits/year)
After some prodding by a host of people (mostly email correspondents) I took the plunge of setting up a real web site. I still used my ISP as the host, but now I was using Front Page Express to put together the pages. The graphic design was, to be blunt, both primitive and ugly. I added more photos, some more articles, and watched the traffic rise to 20-25 visits/day (about 8200 visits/year)
At this point, a friend offered to host the site on his server, where I could use Front Page extensions and could examine the logs to see what people were looking at. I redesigned the site completely, using Front Page 2000, and added even more articles, including my fairly opinionated reviews of various pieces of camera gear. Most of the reviews were based at least in part on stuff I found I was posting on Netnews over and over again, in response to the same questions which crop up over and over and over.
That major update was made in September, 1999. After the update, the traffic on that version of the site grew to about 140 visits/day on weekdays, and about 80-90/day on weekends, or about 3600 visits/month or about 45,000 visits/year.
At the end of summer, 2000, another friend offered to host a domain for me; I purchased the domain butzi.net, and made another major overhaul of the design and content, and put the new site on a different server. It took about five months before the new site was sufficiently well listed with search engines that I was comfortable with removing the old site.
Since then, traffic on the site has grown as I've added material. At the beginning of 2002 the site was averaging roughly 280 visits per day, and roughly 2000 pages viewed per day (many visitors view quite a few pages). Right now (early 2003) the site gets about 300 visits per day.
Setting up a Site:
Setting up a web site is not particularly difficult (or it need not be) but it can be time consuming.
You need:
1. Content. It can be scans of photos, it can be text, it can be text and photos, it can be whatever you want.
2. a Host. Somewhere, there needs to be a computer connected to the internet, which has your content on it, and which is running web server software. It's perfectly possible to run your own web server if you have a high speed, 24/7 internet connection. You can rent space/service from any one of about 10 bazillion web hosting companies for about $10/month.
3. Some web page editing software. I use FrontPage 2000. It's ok. There are a million and six different packages out there. I don't know a single thing about them.
4. Time. It will take you time, effort, and patience to get it all set up.
5. Thick skin. I've gotten some fair (but not heavy) amount of email about my web site. The vast majority (i.e. all but two or three) have been very complimentary. Two or three have been negative, rude, abusive, vulgar, and offensive. There are jerks out there. If you're prepared for jerks, they don't bother you. If you're not prepared, you're going to get at least a few nasty surprises.
6. Knowledge. It will take you a while to learn the ropes. The good news is that mistakes are not fatal. The bad news is that very often mistakes are quite public. Fortunately you can be embarrassed in your own home, so it's not so bad.
Getting Traffic
If you're expecting that you'll set up a web site with your photographs, and people are going to magically find it and view your photos without any effort on your part, you're (sadly) mistaken.
People who visit your site will have to know it is there. They can learn about it in the following ways, listed in order of increasing importance:
1. People will stumble across the site by accident. A certain number of visitors find your site in various accidental ways. They're looking for information on some other Butzi, so they type in www.butzi.com and hit your page. They regularly browse the Internic Directory for interesting domain names, find that you've registered "Bearphoto.com" and check it out. Alas, most of these are people who are not really interested in your stuff, so you can't really count it as useful.
2. Word of mouth. Someone who's seen your site passed the word on to someone else, and now that someone else checks it out.
3. Links on other sites. People who find your site may have their own site, and on that site, they might place a hyperlink to your site, probably along with a glowing recommendation for your site. People who visit their site will see the link, click on it, and Voila! they get your site. Cool, huh?
4. Directories. Various directories of web sites exist. Yahoo is the most famous, but the Open Directory is in widespread use by lots of portal sites. Once you get your site listed in the directory, people will browse the directory, find your listing, and click through onto your site. Various versions of directories exist, including web rings, which allow viewers to go from one site to the next, visiting sites tied together by a common theme (like a love of kittens dyed magenta, for instance, or landscape photography, or people with twelve toes. You name it, there's a web ring for it. There is, in fact, a web ring for web pages whose authors are lefthanders who are INTJ's in the Myer's-Brigg's Type Indicator taxonomy of personalities. No joke.)
5. Search engines. The vast (and I mean VAST) majority of visitors to your site will find it because they typed some query into a search engine, and the search engine knew about your site, deemed it an answer to the query, and served up the URL for the user to click on. The difficulty of getting your web site listed with various search engines varies with the search engine.
Content
Marshall McLuhan told us that "The medium is the message". Despite the ubiquity of this attitude, it's wrong. The medium is the medium. The message is the message. This is true especially on the WWW. Only one thing will attract visitors to your site: content that they want to see. They will not come to see the site just because it is a web site. The fact that you have put your photos on a web site does not make them good, or important, or more desirable, or more imbued with deep philosophic meaning.
This is a bit frustrating. The desirability of content is not easily predictable, and in fact is largely affected by whether the content can be indexed by search engines. Text can. Images (some attempts notwithstanding) cannot, at least yet.
Furthermore, there is no accounting for tastes. A web site which holds some excellent scans of Lewis Hine's photographs, along with text from his writings, takes (as far as I can tell) about ten hits per day [update - the site is now gone]. A web site which consists of nothing except animated chipmunks dancing to jazzy music will take ten million hits/day. Not all messages are created equal - some messages are more desirable than others. The fact that dancing chipmunks are a factor of 1 million more popular than the work of Lewis Hine is a stunning testament to how visual arts and history are presented in our public educational system.
This can lead you (correctly) to the conclusion that you don't just want visitors, you want the RIGHT visitors. It's no good attracting visitors to your web site of street photography by sending out bulk email suggesting that your site has photos of naked teenagers engaged in sex, because those ten million visitors will immediately LEAVE your website regardless of its overall merit, and go to one of the 250 trillion websites which actually DO feature naked teenagers engaged in sex.
This means that you will need to write TEXT which will be indexed by search engines, and which will somehow get displayed by search engines in response to queries (like "Who won the FA cup in 1959?", or "Where can I find pictures of pink teddy bears?, or even "Where can I find photographs by that stellar artist, Paul Butzi?") so that potential visitors become actual visitors.
Now, if you are the sort of person for whom writing comes easily, you're set. If, on the other hand, writing a little blurb about something is for you an experience akin to root canal work, then you're in trouble.
Assuming that you are putting up a web site in order to get your photographs viewed by people, what you want is text which will appeal to the same people who would like your photographs. One obvious group is other photographers, which is why (beyond my desire to be helpful to other photographers) I have articles about photography on my site. People are attracted by the articles, but wander around the site and look at my photos. Some day, some gallery owner/photographer will visit my site, be impressed by my photos, and offer me a show.
Real soon now.
More seriously, I do think that this effect will lead to more photographers becoming photographer/writers. And that might not be an altogether bad thing.
Some Basics
URL: a URL is a Universal Resource Locator, which is just a way of saying it's a name which can be used to find something. Your web page will have a URL which looks something like http://www.myhost.com/ or something similar. The URL for my website is http://www.butzi.net Note that often the 'http://' part is dropped. People are lazy.
HTML: HTML is a *markup* language, which means that it was originally intended to mark up text so that it would be easier to store and search. In HTML, you can say things like "this is a header" and "This is a more important header". The good news is that although you could write HTML yourself (and some strange people like to do this) you can in fact buy a word processor/page layout tool like Frontpage 2000 which will do it for you.
Things I've learned
1. I'd put a lot more thought into structure up front. Changing the structure of a site is hard, both because it takes more work than just doing it right from the outset but also because when you move pages, you break links that other people have made from their site to yours. Those links are the links over which some fraction of your site's traffic will come. Breaking them means that people who wanted to see part of your site can no longer find it. This is Bad.
2. I'd get the web site under my own domain name right at the outset. This gives you a URL which need not change, even if you change the server on which your page is hosted. Remember that the domain is part of the URL, so that if you were hosting your page with your ISP at www.isp.com/butzi, and you change ISP's, your URL will change to www.newisp.com/butzi or something. This will break EVERY link to your site, as well as making you go back and get the search engines to index the site in the new location. This is a tremendous hassle, on the order of writing an epic novel. Take my advice - buy your own domain name, and use it from the very start.
3. When you design your site, you want to make sure it's easy for people to navigate. All of the major parts of the site must be presented at all times - that is, if the person is reading your review of the Leica M6, they should not have to traverse across three pages to find out that you have a gallery of photographs; that choice should be presented along with the review. In my old site, this was done in an ad hoc way. In the new one there's a graphic bar across the top of EVERY page which offers quick access to the major areas of the web site (gallery, articles, reviews, contact info, etc.). My experience is that this greatly increases the odds that the visitor who landed on the site because they asked Altavista "Leica M6 Review" and landed on your M6 review will actually view your photographs of the Washington coast. You get the idea.
4. People like to get 'thumbnails', or smaller versions of the pictures, which are large enough to view but small enough to download quickly. Then they can click on the thumbnail, and get the larger version. Sizes matter. I've found a good size for a thumbnail is about 200 pixels on the short side. A good size for larger versions is about 500 pixels on the long side. Remember, smaller downloads faster. The typical web viewer is not known for patience. If they don't get something to look at in the first few seconds of waiting, they'll move on to something else.
5. When preparing images for Web display, you MUST use unsharp masking. I know that many people (me included) feel that unsharp masking is a widely overused tool in the fine print world. I know that excessive unsharp masking makes things very UGLY. Nevertheless, when preparing a little 200x300 pixel version of your 11x14inch fine print, you need to do SOMETHING to make up for the massive loss of information that makes the 200x300 image look so, well, fuzzy. The something you do is unsharp masking. You must unsharp mask EVERY IMAGE by hand. Do not let your web page tool automatically generate smaller thumbnail versions of images, because the automatically generated versions will not be properly unsharp masked, and they will look perfectly crappy. Did I mention that you must adjust the unsharp masking for EACH IMAGE, and you must adjust it BY HAND to make the image look right? Well , you do, and I can tell you, it's not much fun. That's life.
6. If you're putting your photos on the web, you will want Photoshop. Sure, there are other competitive products out there. Sure, Photoshop was written as a joke by a bunch of manic depressive software engineers out to wreak their revenge on an unsuspecting populace. But it's the standard, so you might as well learn to live with it. Gritting your teeth doesn't help much. A nice glass of merlot might.
7. Brace yourself. Some large percentage of your finest images will look like complete crud on the WWW. Images that are highly graphic, have a sparse composition, and do not depend on fine detail work well on the WWW. Images which depend on fine detail, which are busier composition, or which are about texture often are miserable on the WWW. Surprisingly, images which depend a great deal on tonal smoothness often look fabulous. High key images can be knockouts. Low key images are often failures, both because most monitors are not properly calibrated but also because prints are reflective but the screen glows, and the impact of low key images is radically different. The small size of the reproduction can often hide defects that are major in a print. Visual puns are often lost because the detail (like what that street sign actually says) are lost in the small, low resolution version.
8. Quiet images are not likely to draw repeat visits. Just as with the selection process for a juried show, the majority of visitors will view each image only for a handful of seconds (if that long). Any image which is not immediately arresting will not get viewed at higher resolution. Furthermore, if you daisy-chain images so that viewers see them in sequence, if they get two duds in a row, they're gone to the next web site, in search of easier stimulation. Given the amount of effort needed to get a good rendition of an image onto your web site (e.g. making and scanning a good print, (or scanning the negative), making adjustments in photoshop, etc. etc, and putting the result on a page, then updating your web site) it's not worth it unless it's a winner image that will play well on the WWW. If I had another dollar for every web site I've visited where the photographer said "Oh, and by the way, these sucky scans don't hold a candle to my really truly Fine Prints", I'd have a LOT more dollars. No one cares. Resist the temptation to scan everything you've got, and just do the really good stuff.
8a. Resist the temptation to put little signs on your web site that say "Under construction". EVERY web site is under construction. If you're not ready to have people see it, don't put it on the server.
9. I don't know of ANYONE who is making any significant money selling their prints over the WWW. That doesn't mean it can't be done, but it does mean that you might really want to check it out before you get too deep into heavy ecommerce stuff that will cost a large investment but not net you money. If you can't make money with a toll-free phone number on the web site for taking orders, you aren't going to make money with automated web-shopping-carts and credit-card checkout a la Amazon.com. I don't actually try to sell stuff on my site, but this is the word I hear on the grapevine.
10. Frontdoor/entry/splash pages. Lots of web sites have put lots of effort into fancy/schmancy entry pages with spiffy animated graphics and cool noises/music/etc. that will impress people, and then the (presumably impressed) people will click the 'enter' button to proceed to the *real* web site. There are several fundamental reasons why this is a waste of effort. a) Such pages load slowly, tick people off, and are generally irritating, so that many people will be too pissed off to click on your 'enter' button. b) Because 99% of the people who visit your web site will end up there because they found it via a search engine, the first page they'll see is buried three levels down in your web site, and they'll never get the chance to be irritated at your self-indulgent entry page.
10a) Music. Don't do it. Really. Somewhere out there, there's someone who loves it when they're browsing the WWW while their partner naps on the couch, and they hit a page with blaring music which aborts their partner's restful nap. But nearly everyone else on the planet HATES music on web sites. Even Mozart. Honest. I don't care how much it complements your photos, don't do it. You have been warned. There's only one thing to be said of background music on web sites: "It may take a long time to download, but it sure is annoying." To make matters worse, the usual background music solution is some sort of MIDI stream which sounds perfectly awful. Don't even think about it.
10b) Cool stuff. The amount of cool stuff you can do, with fancy buttons that blink and scrolling text and animated email icons and stuff, it's just staggering. Resist it all. If you want to build a web site people will return to, you must staunchly resist all such temptations. Just repeat over and over, "Understated Elegance, Understated Elegance". Simpler is better. This does not mean that Ugly is better. Simple can look nice. Honest.
Why have a web site, anyway?
All of this brings us to the bottom line - why should you bother to put up a web site? Simply put, it boils down to three reasons:
- You want to make some money selling your art
- You want your art to get some exposure
- You want to share your experience and expertise
Make some money selling your art
Let me deliver the bottom line first. Up until early 2003, there was NO indication that my work was for sale on this website. None, as in zip, zilch, nada. There were no cunningly worded hints, nothing at all. Period.
Despite this complete lack of promotion, in 2002 I received a fair number of inquiries (via email) asking if prints were for sale. So many, in fact, that I sold more prints via these unsolicited inquiries in 2003 than I've sold through other venues my entire life. Let me tell you, even a fairly thick person like me can get the message when it's delivered like this. You'll note that there's now a 'sales' tab on the top of the page menu bar. I may be slow, but I'm not completely daft.
Get some exposure
I've had my work hung in galleries. It's a lot of work, a significant expense, and to be painfully honest, the rewards are small. It's nice to see the work up on the gallery wall, but at most shows I attend, sales are either thin or non-existent.
Now, putting together a website can be a lot of work, too, but the expense of assembling and maintaining a website is probably small compared to the expense of mounting a show once a year.
And now, think carefully - how many people will actually look at your work in a gallery? If your work doesn't have a big reputation (mine doesn't), probably not very many. In contrast, some 300 people a day look at some part of my web site. Roughly half of the visitors at least glance at the photographs. Some visitors spend more than an hour browsing the images on the web site. I regularly get emailed comments from visitors, both on the articles and on the images. It would have to be a really well promoted gallery show before the gallery would get 150 people a day visiting and looking at my photographs. And on my website, my work is available for viewing 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. How long will your work hang in a gallery?
My conclusion is that there's a lot more exposure on the web than there is in mounting a show. When you factor in the difference in effort and cost, it's pretty easy to justify a web site.
Sharing your experience and expertise
I admit it - I'm an idealist. I worked with computers for years because I firmly believed (and still believe) that widespread access to cheap, powerful computing could change the world and move the human race one more step away from that era where life could be summed up as 'nasty, brutish, and short'.
Just before the internet and the WWW became household words, my daughter was writing a school report on dolphins. I suggested she check the web for info, and she found a web site run by a dolphin research center in the former Soviet Union. She sent email to one of the researchers, and got a very nice, detailed response - from a researcher who was, as far as I could tell, 12,000 miles away from my home. From 12,000 miles away, someone who had no reason except fundamental decency took time out of his day and answered questions for a middle-schooler in country that only a few short years before had been his enemy. A lot of bad stuff happens in the world and everyone ignores the good stuff. This is good stuff. Really Good Stuff.
My web site has been visited by people all over the world. I've gotten emailed questions from people as far away as Pakistan, which is quite literally on the other side of the world from me.
As a result of my web site, I've corresponded with photographers in Bosnia, in Denmark, in Australia, in Hong Kong. I've offered advice to High School students in Copenhagen and just up the road from my home. I've made some good friends.
Everyone has something to share. Share it. If the rewards don't entice you into it, consider it your obligation as a human.
Heaven doth with us as we with torches do, not light them for ourselves; For if our virtues did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike as if we had them not.William Shakespeare, Measure For Measure, act 1, scene 1
