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1. Add Fresh Content
With the new year on the horizon, our design experts recommend refreshing the images and content on your website to make sure you are displaying recent and relevant work. “So many people like to build their site and forget it.  We’ve found that the most successful websites are those that are updated regularly,” says Ryan Maher, designer at liveBooks.com.  Just like a store changes the display window each season, we recommend refreshing the work displayed on your site two or three times a year.

2. Keep Mobile in Mind
It’s no secret that the world is going mobile. As more and more of your website traffic comes from smart phones and tablets, you need to make sure your website is optimized for those visitors. Whether you use a responsive website platform or enable a mobile-optimized version of your desktop site, you need to be sure your website looks good –and functions well– across all devices.

Expert Tip: Design with mobile in mind.  The mobile visitor behaves differently than the desktop visitor- make sure your site looks good for both!

3. Use Clear Navigation
Website Designer Adam Royer advises, “Function over fashion. User-friendliness is a must!” As you build your website, have an idea in mind of what you want your visitors to do when they land there. Do you want them to view your portfolio? Contact you? Watch a video? Whatever your answer, make sure your navigation and layout makes it easy for people to go to the pages you are hoping to highlight. A clean navigation menu is one of the easiest way to accomplish this!

Expert Tip: Make sure the text is legible! Use fonts that are large enough to be read on all devices.

4. Blog Regularly
Since we don’t all have time to change the photos on our website every week, a blog is a great way to add fresh content to your web presence without altering the look and feel of your website. Make it a goal to generate one blog post per week. You can start short and simple, just try to get something out there. Not only will new blog posts engage your visitors and showcase your recent work, it is also a huge benefit from an SEO perspective, as search engines tend to favor sites producing new content.

5. Let Your Images Do the Talking
Your photos are your calling card, show them off! One of the biggest trends in website design for 2015 is large, full-bleed photos that extend across the entire page. We recommend choosing a few photos that convey your vision, and displaying them (in a rotating slider or stacked) on your homepage.  A great website design that uses this full-bleed feature is the STATURE template within the liveBooks Professional Design Templates.

6. SEO
Search Engine Optimization is considered one of the most important things you can do for your website. No matter how great your site looks, and how user friendly it is, search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are not going to display it in their results without the proper keywords, tags, backlinks, etc.  While search algorithms change constantly, (making it nearly impossible to “game the system”) one thing you can do to help your ranking is to name your images. Since most photographers websites are portfolio based, you can counteract the lack of keywords with naming and alt tags in your images.

7. Make it Easy to Contact You
You’ve worked hard to get visitors to your site- make sure you’re making it easy for them to contact you!  Whether you utilize a traditional contact form or simply write out your contact information, our experts recommend having a way to contact you listed from every single page of your website.

Expert Tip: Contact forms with fewer than 5 fields perform best!

8. Showcase Videos
Whether or not you have a videography component to your work, including two or three videos on your site is a great way to engage your visitors and bring your work to life.  Each liveBooks template allows for vimeo integration, providing you with the ability to have a video grid, single video, or full-page video embedded into your site.  Some suggested video types include: behind the scenes footage of a shoot, a welcome video of you talking about your work or a promotional video featuring your work.

Expert Tip: Videos perform better when they are integrated into your site, rather than requiring a pop-up to play.

9. Track Visitor Behavior
In order to ensure that your website is performing the way you want it to, you need to understand what people are doing (or not doing) on your site.  Google analytics is one of the easiest (and cheapest- it’s free!) ways to track the behavior of visitors to your website.  Once you understand how visitors are engaging with your site, you can adjust photos, content, and calls to action to maximize each visit.  Notice that people keep hitting your pricing page after visiting a specific gallery? Highlight that gallery on your homepage to increase conversions!

10. Choose the Right Photos
Some photos resonate better than others when put up on your website.  Designer Ryan Mahar recommends that you have a portfolio editor or even some friends or colleagues go through your images and pick out their favorites. Then choose what to upload accordingly.