4 Key Elements of a Great Photography WordPress Website

Your photography is creative and stunning, and those qualities should also apply to your website. However, if the thought of tackling the design and development of your site sounds overwhelming, you’ll likely need a helping hand – something with great foundations that that can be built upon to help match your unique requirements.

Avada includes a number of demo pages that provide inspiration and a solid starting point for creating your website. Our Photography demo is tailor-made for photographers, with almost all of the functionality you’ll require to create a outstanding website with minimal effort.

In this post, we’ll present four elements of a great photography website – as featured in our Photography demo – before showing you how to incorporate them on your own website. Let’s get cracking!

Ensuring that your images are prominent and captivating throughout your site is a no-brainer. The way your images are presented represents both your ability and your taste, so showcasing them well is absolutely vital.

Fortunately, Avada has you covered! Our own Avada Slider packs a lot of punch into its admin panel, and is perfect for displaying prominent images and calls to action:

To create your own slider, navigate to the Avada Slider admin panel on the WordPress dashboard, then click Add or Edit Sliders. You’ll see a screen showing a list of your current sliders on the right, and the Add Slider section on the left:

Among the options here you can set the slider’s size, whether it’s full-screen, animation type and speed, and much more. When finished, click Add Slider at the bottom.

Next up is adding slides. Navigate to Add or Edit Slides in your WordPress dashboard – where you’ll see a list of your current slides – and click Add New Slide at the top of the screen:

From the next screen, give your slide a suitable name, upload an image using the Featured Image meta box, then start customizing the myriad of options at your disposal. You can select whether your slide is an image or video, add a heading and caption and adjust their look, and customize up to two call to action buttons.

Finally, link the slide to your chosen slider from the Avada Sliders meta box on the right hand side of the page…

…and when you’re done, save your slide as you would a page or post by clicking the blue button in the top right hand corner.

To display your Avada Slider at the head to your desired page, scroll down to the Avada Page Options panel at the bottom, then select the Sliders tab. From the Slider Type drop-down select Avada Slider, pick your slider from the list found in the Select Avada Slider drop-down:

Finally, remember to save any changes you make to your page at the top of the screen.

Much like using images correctly, a captivating and easy to navigate portfolio should be central to your website – after all, it’s often going to be a major source of traffic.

Out of the box, Avada enables easy creation of your portfolio directly from the WordPress dashboard. To add a new entry, navigate to Portfolio > Add New:

Here, give your entry a suitable name, and begin using the Fusion Builder’s Column Options and Builder Elements to create your portfolio entry. In this example, we’ve used a number of single and double columns to create our layout, then added the Image Frame element to each section:

Hovering over the Image Frame element and clicking the paintbrush icon brings up the element’s options…

…and it’s from here that you add your image and customize how it’s presented, including alignment, any border style you wish to apply, and more:

A website that offers some ‘behind the lens’ context to you or your team brings a desirable human element to your brand, and also gives visitors the opportunity to connect with what you do – which could potentially increase sales.

By once again pressing a selection of Fusion Builder Elements into service, you too can create a captivating About page:

In our example, we’ve firstly used a combination of one and two column elements to create a layout, then used the Text Block and Separator Bar elements to show off our skill set:

Further down the page, we’ve utilized the Image Carousel element to showcase our current client base:

By clicking the paintbrush icon as we did when creating a portfolio, we can add our images, and tweak a multitude of other options:

A Contact page may not be considered very sexy, but one that’s well-designed can certainly compel people into making contact with you. Your contact form can be where people first approach you to discuss a working relationship, and an overly complex and uninviting page can do more harm than good.

Using the Contact Form 7 plugin bundled with Avada along with some choice Fusion Builder Elements, we can create a Contact page to be proud of:

Firstly, you’ll need to create your contact form.

Head to the Contact admin panel in your WordPress dashboard, where you’ll see your current contact forms. To build a new one, click Add New at the top of the page.

From the next screen, you’ll see the available elements displayed along the top of the Form tab, and once clicked, they bring up that element’s edit options. In our example, we’re adding a text entry field asking for the user’s name:

Once you’ve created your form, copy the shortcode in the blue bar at the top of the screen, then click Save:

To display our contact form, we created a page titled Hire Me and created a suitable layout, before adding a Text Block Builder Element and pasting our shortcode into the text editor:

When creating your own contact form, take a minute to read through the documentation, making sure you’ve carried out the full setup process – otherwise your emails may reach you late (or not at all).

Overflowing creative juices are all well and good, but creating a website to match your stunning work might just be a little too overwhelming. However, that shouldn’t stop you from being able to create a stellar website.

Avada includes a number of demo sites to help spark your creativity, and here we’ve presented four elements you can find on a great photography website, all achievable within Avada’s Photography demo:

What elements do you consider vital for a great photography website? Share your views in the comments section below!

Image credit: Unsplash.