The short answer is YES!

It doesn’t matter how much you try to protect your images, there is always going to be one clever person out there who will figure out how to steal them! The music and film industry has spent millions of pounds and countless years trying to stop people from copying and effectively stealing their products. However as soon as they come up with a new technique, some clever 14 year old sitting in their parents box room, comes up with a way of breaking the protection and it starts all over again!

The same applies to your images. You can take measures to avoid widespread exploitation of your images, however you are not going to stop it completely. The aim of this article is to educate you as to how people can steal your images and offer advice to help you prevent it.

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As a visual creative you are going to need a website. Unless you have a bricks and mortar building, such as a studio to attract passing trade, how else are new clients going to find you? Of course this isn’t the only thing that you are going to need, as you will also need to market yourself with printed materials, such as business cards and flyers too.

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Following up from the last post, here are six links to useful portfolio building advice articles.

The articles are generally geared towards graphic designers, however the advice is pretty universal. There’s some really usefull information in these articles, including advice on where to host your portfolio images for free, common pitfalls to avoid and advice on what content to include in your portfolio.

Creating a successful online portfolio

10 Solutions to easily create your online portfolio

How to create a better online portfolio

The perfect portfolio

12 Tips for creating a great portfolio site

Build a killer online portfolio in 9 easy steps

Finding the right portfolio website hosting service can be very tricky and time consuming. There are a number of different portfolio hosting sites our there, all with different features and price tags.

While writing the recent Case Study: New Photographers Web Presence (part 3) post, I researched the different options available and compiled a comparison table, listing each companies products, along with prices and features, to help Matt choose the right one to match his requirements. It ended up becoming a very large table with a lot of different features listed.

The comparison table lists services from Viewbook, liveBooks, Clickbooq, Parade, BluDomain, FolioSnap, SmugMug, Creative Motion Design (CMD), BigFolio, Qufoto, Clikpic and A Photo Folio.

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In the first part of this case study talked about the importance of a web presence for photographer and introduced Matt Bridge-Wilkinson, in the second part we took a look at Matt’s current web presence.

This is the third part of the case study, which takes a look at what Matt’s options are for setting up a web presence. Matt also provides us with his thoughts about the services we’ve talked about.

Types Of Web Presence

There are a number of different ways in which a photographer (or other visual creative) can showcase their work. These include portfolio showcase websites, a personal portfolio website, a blog and even Facebook. You are not limited to choosing one of these either, you can have as many as you want and to be honest the more you have, the better your chance of exposure is.

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After reviewing Jake Garn’s portfolio website three weeks ago, we contacted him to ask if he would like to provide any feedback and if he could explain the design decisions behind his website.  In the middle of a busy schedule Jake was kind enough to answer our questions with some very interesting answers:

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If you try to access a page on a website which doesn’t exist, either because of a typo or a bad link, the server will return a 404 error code (page not found).  If the website doesn’t have a way of handling this error you will get the default error page, which I think everyone will agree is boring and not very helpful.

So what can you do to make this page more interesting?

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In the first part of this case study, we talked about the importance of setting up a consistent and well branded web presence. We also introduced Matt Bridge-Wilkinson, our photographer guinea pig for these case studies.

We found out that Matt is looking to improve his current web presence and present himself as a wedding and portrait photographer.

The next step is to take a look at Matt’s existing web presence and identify its strengths and weaknesses and find out if it successfully markets Matt as a wedding and portrait photographer.

Current Web Presence

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This is the fourth in a series of design reviews which take a look at pro photographers portfolio websites and review the different design elements.

This time we are taking a look at Jake Garn’s portfolio website. Jake is a commercial, fashion and beauty photographer, based near Salt Lake City, Utah.

His portfolio website is a combination of a Carbon Made gallery with a custom designed website wrapped around it. Jake describes his photography style as ‘Whimsical Fashion’ and his sites appearance also reflects this well.

Lets take a closer look at it:

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Starting out as a new photographer there are many obstacles to overcome. Obtaining equipment, training, gaining experience, building up a high quality body of work, looking for new clients, setting up a web presence and much more. This case study is going to be taking a closer look at the latter, setting up a web presence.

First of all lets define what ‘Web Presence’ means. An example of your web presence is your portfolio website, it showcases you and your work to the world. However it doesn’t end there, your web presence extends to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. If you search for yourself on Google, the pages which are returned which relate to you are your web presence.

It is important that your web presence is consistent, positive and best showcases you and your work. The last thing you want, is to spend thousands of pounds on a professional portfolio website, only to find out that potential clients are Googling you and finding your Twitter page, which contains lots of posts putting other people down and generally leaving people with a negative image.

To help you better understand what your current web presence is and how to establish your new web presence as a photographer, we are going to conduct a case study. This case study is going to follow a new photographer who is starting to set up a portfolio website for himself. We will first analyse his current web presence and then see how this can be improved and look at the different options for creating a successful web presence as a photographer.

First of all lets take a look at our new photographer, Matthew Bridge-Wilkinson.

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