The couple searching for websites for photographers in Dublin have a date, a venue and a feeling about the kind of pictures they want. They look at your gallery for about a minute, decide whether your style is theirs, and then look for two things most photographer sites hide: what you charge and whether you are free on their Saturday. The parents booking a newborn session and the HR manager who needs forty headshots done in an afternoon are doing the same thing with different words.
We build the site so the galleries load on a phone, set up the enquiry and the booking fee, and send you the numbers each month. You take the pictures.
The gallery is the pitch, so it has to load
A photographer’s site fails in one of two ways. Either it shows too little, a dozen highlights that could be anyone’s, or it shows too much at full size and takes so long to appear on 4G that the couple has moved on. The fix is editing and sizing. Pick your best twelve for the home page. Then build full galleries by type of work, and include at least one complete wedding from the morning to the band, because couples want to see how you handle the dull bits and the dark bits, not only the golden hour.
Every image is resized for the web before it goes near the page. You send us the exports and we take care of that. Newborn, family, headshot and event galleries each get their own page, because a company looking for headshots does not want to scroll past bridesmaids to find them.
Put the price guide on the page
The time-wasting enquiry is a photographer’s daily tax: a long email, a reply with the price, silence. A price guide on the site collects most of that tax before it reaches you. Packages with from-prices and what each includes: hours of coverage, a second shooter, an engagement shoot, an album, travel, and how long until the gallery arrives. Couples with a budget enquire with confidence. Couples without one do not enquire at all, which is the point.
Say how you deliver too. An online gallery with downloads, prints available, the number of edited images, whether the raw files are ever handed over. These are the questions in every second enquiry, and answering them once on the page saves answering them forever by email.
The date question comes first
“Are you free on the 14th of June” is the first line of almost every wedding enquiry, so the form asks for the date, the venue and the kind of day before anything else, and lands on your phone and in your email with the answer already shaped. If you keep a list of dates already booked for the year ahead, it goes on the page and you update it from your phone. Nobody falls in love with your work and then finds out you are taken.
Once you have said yes, the booking fee holds the date, paid by card on the site rather than by a bank transfer you have to check for. We have written up how deposits and booking fees work online in Ireland, including what Irish consumer rules expect the wording to say. For mini sessions and headshot mornings, people can pick a slot and pay without any email at all.
Engagement season, Communion Saturdays and the autumn rush
Wedding enquiries arrive in a wave from Christmas to Valentine’s Day, when the engagements of December turn into planning, and most of those couples are booking a year or more out. May fills with Communions and Confirmations. The autumn brings family sessions for the Christmas card, and January brings headshots from people who resolved to sort out their LinkedIn. A line at the top of the site saying what you are currently booking, and where the gaps are, is the cheapest marketing you will ever do.
If you shoot weddings alongside a videographer, say so and say how the two of you work the day. Couples ask, and a photographer who already has an answer is easier to book.
What we need from you
Forty to sixty of your best images, exported for the web or as they are and we will size them, grouped by type of work, your packages with from-prices and what they include, your delivery times, a photo of you with a camera in your hands, and a short piece in your own words about how you shoot a day. Ten minutes on the phone covers the rest. If your current site is on a builder and you are unsure whether to move it, the Wix versus Squarespace versus hiring someone guide is an honest comparison.
Plan and price
Complete is €1,499 to set up and €100 a month, and it is the right plan for a working wedding or portrait photographer because the booking fee by card, the bookable sessions and the review request after each gallery all earn their place. Essentials, at €499 and €50 a month, covers the portfolio, the enquiry form and the Google listing for someone shooting part time. Both are set out on the pricing page.