Website builder for photographers

Photographers have the opposite problem to most small businesses: too much material and no structure. You have thousands of frames and no obvious way to turn them into five pages that make a stranger email you. Siteglade generates the structure. You bring the edit.

You describe the business in the prompt bar, the agent writes a real project, and a live preview updates while it works. If a build breaks its own preview, a bounded auto-fix loop repairs it before you see a blank screen. What you end up with is a codebase you can open in the built-in editor, not a locked template.

This page covers what a photography site has to do, the mistakes that make one feel slow, and exactly what to type so the first generation lands close.

What a photography website actually has to do

A photography site is not an archive. It is a filter. Its job is to make the right client, the one whose budget and taste match yours, feel that you are the obvious choice, and to let the wrong one leave quickly. Everything else is decoration.

That reframes the brief. You do not need every wedding you have ever shot. You need eight to twelve frames that represent the work you want more of. If you shoot weddings but want to move into editorial, a wedding gallery three times the size of the editorial one tells visitors precisely the opposite of what you intend.

The second job is logistical. Before anyone writes to you they want three answers: do you shoot this kind of thing, are you plausibly available and affordable, and how do I start. A site that answers all three inside a minute converts. One that hides them behind a mood board doesn't.

• Show fewer images than you want to. Twelve strong frames beat sixty good ones.
• Lead with the work you want booked next, not the work you happen to have most of.
• Give a pricing signal somewhere, even if it is only a starting figure.
• Keep the contact path visible from every page, not buried in the footer.

The pages a working photographer needs

Most photography sites need five pages and no more: home, a small set of galleries split by genre, an about page with your face on it, an information page covering what a booking includes, and a contact page. Adding a blog, a print shop and a resources hub before those five are good is the most reliable way to leave a site half-finished for a year.

Split galleries by the way clients search, not by the way you file. People look for weddings, family, brand, food, interiors. Nobody looks for 2024 or for a camera body. One gallery per service you actually sell, and if you do not sell it, it does not get a gallery.

The about page carries more weight in this field than almost any other, because someone is deciding whether to spend a whole day standing next to you. A real photograph of yourself, a paragraph in your own voice and a plain description of how you work does more than a page of adjectives.

• Home: one hero frame, a two-line statement of what you shoot and where, three ways into the galleries.
• Galleries: one per service, twelve to twenty-four images, a consistent crop rhythm.
• About: portrait, background, working style, and the practical details such as travel and turnaround.
• Information: what a booking includes, delivery timeline, a starting price you're comfortable publishing.
• Contact: date, location, shoot type, budget range, message. Four or five fields, not twelve.

Image weight is the whole game

The one technical thing that separates a professional-feeling photography site from an amateur one is how quickly the first gallery image paints. A six-megabyte export straight out of your editor looks identical on screen to a 250-kilobyte one, and costs you the visitor who is browsing on a train.

Do the compression before you upload. Then ask the build to handle the rest: lazy loading below the fold so the browser never fetches image forty before anyone scrolls near it, and explicit width and height on every image so the layout stops jumping around while things load.

Say this out loud in the prompt. Ask for lazy-loaded galleries, fixed image dimensions, and a single optimized hero rather than a slideshow of six. A carousel that preloads every slide is the most common reason a beautiful photography site feels sluggish on a phone. Because the preview updates live as the agent edits, you can watch the difference immediately instead of guessing.

• Export sRGB, quality around 75 to 80, and strip the metadata you do not need.
• Ask explicitly for lazy loading and intrinsic image dimensions.
• Prefer one strong still over an autoplaying hero slideshow.
• Test on a phone over mobile data, not on studio wifi.

Client galleries, proofing and where to draw the line

Your marketing site and your client delivery system are two different products, and merging them is a trap. The public site sells. Delivery hands over hundreds of full-resolution files with favorites, downloads and expiry dates. Dedicated proofing platforms exist because that problem is genuinely hard.

The pragmatic split is to keep the public site on Siteglade and link out to whichever delivery tool you already pay for. Clients get a link, your site stays fast, and nothing about your workflow has to change.

If you do want a gated area on the site itself, a private page for one client or a password-protected preview, Siteglade Cloud can provision a database, authentication and storage for a project on the Pro and Max plans, behind an explicit consent step you have to approve yourself. That is enough for a simple gated gallery. It is not a substitute for a full proofing suite with comments and print fulfilment.

For showing work in progress there is a lighter option: any project can be shared through a tokenized preview link without publishing it, which is a good way to let a client see the site before it goes live.

How to describe your photography business in the prompt

The quality of the first generation tracks almost exactly with how specific your prompt is. The model cannot guess that you shoot medium-format film in the Pacific Northwest and start at 4,800 dollars. Tell it.

Cover six things: what you shoot, who for, where you work, the visual register you want, the pages you need, and the single action a visitor should take. Concrete constraints beat adjectives, so name the palette, the typographic feel and the layout rules rather than asking for something elegant.

Here is a prompt that produces something usable on the first run: 'Build a five-page site for a wedding and editorial photographer based in Portland, Oregon, shooting mostly medium-format film. Warm, muted, film-like palette, generous white space, a serif display face for headings and a quiet sans for body copy. Pages: home, weddings gallery, editorial gallery, about, inquire. Home has one full-bleed hero image, a two-line statement and three links into the galleries. Galleries are lazy-loaded masonry grids with no captions overlaid on the images. About has a portrait, three paragraphs and travel availability. The inquire page has a short form with date, location, shoot type, budget range and a message, and states that coverage starts at 4,800 dollars. Everything must stay fast on a phone.'

Then iterate in small steps. 'Make the gallery two columns on mobile and drop the caption overlay' beats 'make it nicer' every time. You can also click straight into elements in the live preview with the visual style editor and change spacing, text, images and motion without describing them in words at all.

Getting found by couples and art directors

Photography search is still overwhelmingly local and intent-driven. People type a genre plus a city, or a venue name, or a style word. Your site should contain those words as ordinary prose, written for humans, not stuffed into a list.

Name your city and the region you cover on the home page and in your site title. If you regularly work at particular venues, mention them where it is honest to do so. Write image alt text as a real description of what is in the frame, which helps both search and anyone using a screen reader.

Site settings control your site title, description, favicon and social share image, which is what shows up in search results and when somebody pastes your link into a group chat. The share image matters more than photographers expect: a link with no preview gets scrolled past.

On Pro and Max the analytics view aggregates sessions, page views, sources and devices for your published site, so you can see whether your traffic is search, social or a referral from a venue, and stop guessing which of those is worth your time.

Last updated: 2026-08-16