Whether you're a professional or doing photography as a hobby there's a good chance you want to show off your work. And what better way to show off your best photos than a website? In this article I'll walk you through some of the powerful features that make WebStarts the perfect place to create your photography website.
WebStarts is great for photography for a number of reasons. The most obvious is probably the fact you can get your website online for free. If you like how the app works and you want to gain access to the premium features you can upgrade at anytime, and you're welcome to use the free plan as long as you'd like.
WebStarts is a cloud based application which is cool, there's no software you need to install on your computer, and no web pages that need to be uploaded and downloaded to make updates. Simply login from any computer connected to the web and you're able to create your site and make changes. WebStarts also provides you with a web address and you can easily connect a domain name with any premium plan. With that being said let's jump right in and talk about what specific things WebStarts offers for photography.
Photo Galleries
Once you've created your WebStarts account it's super easy to add a photo gallery to your page. A photo gallery is a collection of your photos displayed in a grid. You've probably seen these types of photo displays all across the web. They let the user glance at a collection of photos and then click on a thumbnail to get a closer look.
WebStarts provides style controls for all the elements that appear on your page, including photo galleries. This enables you to customize the look and feel of your photo gallery. For example you can choose whether to display a border, shadow, hover over effects, and more.
When creating a photo gallery you can select photos from your computer or popular sources like Facebook and Instagram.
Slideshows
Slideshows are a great way to show off the full glory of each photo one at a time. Slideshows work similar to photo galleries in that you can add photos from the same sources and customize the appearance. With Slideshows you can even adjust the type of transition between photos, the speed of transition, as well as choose from a number of flows.
Protected Pages
As a photographer there may be times where you don't want everyone to have access to all the photos on your site and with the membership app built-in to WebStarts it's easy require a login for specific pages. You can find the membership app under the apps panel. It allows you to include a link to sign up and login on specified pages. You can choose to automatically or manually approve access under the membership manager.
Right Click Disable
If you're selling your photographs WebStarts includes a feature to help you protect your work called right click disable. This adds code to your pages that prevents visitors from being able to right click and download copies of your work. You can find the option while in the editor view under the manage icon.
Image Optimization
Another cool, built-in feature of WebStarts is the image optimization. Many times the photos you're uploading to your website are going to be of a large file size. Large file sizes really slow down loading times on web pages. If pages to load, visitors leave your site, and never see your photos. WebStarts solves that problem by optimizing your images not only to look great but also be the smallest possible file size while doing it. This ensures your pages load as fast as possible without compromising photo quality.
Of course WebStarts is good for much more than creating photography website. If you're ready to learn more you can sign up for free by visiting WebStarts.com.