How to Use AI to Create a Photography Website That Sells

Want to see how AI can help you build a website you’re proud to share and help you grow your photography business? Then you’re in the right place.

Every professional photographer knows how important it is to have a website. But not everyone has the budget to hire a professional designer for this crucial step in building a business.

Website builders with customizable templates have been around for years, promising an easy DIY solution. But if you’ve ever tried one of these, you know that it’s not as simple as it sounds.

You probably had no idea how to structure the content, choose the right template or colors… Hell, you probably didn’t even know which photos to include in the portfolio.

Thanks to AI, now you have an “assistant” to help you out throughout the entire process. From planning to executing to keeping things updated, there’s an AI tool that can improve your work.

So, here’s a guide that will show you how you can make use of AI to build a more compelling website. One that showcases your photos, draws in your ideal clients, helps you book photo shoots, sell prints, and much more.

Sounds good, right? Well, let’s get down to it.

How Can AI Help You Build a Website for Your Photography Business?

Website structure

The website structure refers to how you organize your website’s content. This will determine the user’s journey, which is essential to convert website browsing into photoshoot bookings.

The website’s structure will help you decide where to put your contact details for maximum impact, how many categories you include in your portfolio, where people can find out more about you, etc.

Have you ever visited a website and you can’t find the price of the product you’re interested in, or where to look for the services they offer? This is because the person building the website didn’t consider the navigation flow. You probably closed it and moved on to the next one, right?

A well-planned structure not only improves the user experience, but it also impacts the search engine optimization (SEO). Web designers, UX designers, or marketing consultants usually handle this task.

If you’re going to do this yourself, though, you can use AI bots such as ChatGPT—or ChatGPT alternatives like Claude or Copilot—to help you make a more efficient structure. You can also use them to draft a map that a professional can build upon.

You can start by asking it for a sitemap tailored for a photography business. Make sure you include the specifics of your business, like the type of services you offer and what should be included – for example, a booking service or a page where people can buy prints.

From there, you can interact with the AI assistant until you’ve fine-tuned the results to cater to your specific needs.

The great thing about using AI as your “partner” is that it can ask you specific questions to offer you better suggestions. Remember that you can always come back to this step if you’re losing visitors somewhere along the way.

Finding the perfect structure will always require some trial and error. However, if you have a good starting point by using AI in your favour, you’ll certainly save some time and frustration during this process.

Building your brand

In this scenario, building your photography brand means choosing your colors, fonts, graphic elements, and the tone of voice you use in your communication.

These elements tell potential clients who you are—before they even see your work. When someone lands on your website, they should instantly get a sense of your style.

If your style matches their expectations, they will continue navigating your site. Even more important than the first impression is the coherence.

Let’s say you’re a wedding photographer. If your brand is modern and editorial, a website with pastel colors, a floral logo, and a romantic cursive font would feel out of place. It might even disappoint potential clients who were expecting an ethereal, classic style of photography.

So, you can use ChatGPT or another AI assistant to help you build a brand according to your style and the type of client you’re catering to. An example of this prompt could be:

“Suggest a color palette and a tone of voice for a photography website targeting luxury weddings. Include hex codes and font types.”

There are also AI-powered color palette generators you can use for this task. Some of them are Colormind or Khroma. There’s also an AI feature inside Adobe Illustrator called Generative Recolor. This tool suggests new color palettes for your designs.

Image editing and optimization

It goes without saying that even the best website won’t help you grow your business if the photos in your portfolio are weak.

There’s AI software that can improve your workflow so you can easily cull, edit, and optimize your pictures for the web. Here at Shotkit, you’ll find plenty of articles discussing the best tools for each task.

However, I’ll give you a few examples here to show you how AI is revolutionizing the field.

If you want to browse your library to find the photos you want to include in your portfolio, there are photo managers that can help you find an exact picture by describing it. Using keywords, you can also look up all the images that share a common theme or style.

These AI tools are sometimes included in all-in-one software such as Lightroom and Neo, or they can be stand-alone programs like Excire. Find out more about the best AI photo search tools here.

Meanwhile, culling large photoshoots can be extremely useful for wedding or event photographers. AI tools like Narrative exist for this task. This type of software can asses photos and make decisions based on image quality.

Machine learning programs can even learn your style after you’ve manually culled a few sessions. The more you use them, the more efficient they become.

We’ve got a guide to the best culling software here, so check that out for more.

You can also use AI-powered editing software to crop and resize your images so they perform best on a website. This means that pages on your website will load faster while maintaining the best possible quality.

Last but not least, you need to optimize your photos for SEO. Some photo managers help you add keywords in the metadata. Furthermore, services like Imagify and ShortPixel also generate descriptive names to make your photos perform better in search engines.

AI-powered website builders

Website builders used to be very easy to use for anyone who didn’t know how to code. However, it was entirely up to you to find a template that you liked and customize it to make it work for you.

Now, you can find website builders that leverage AI to make this task even simpler and more efficient. Wix is an excellent example of this type of service.

Simply use the integrated AI chatbot to describe your business and your services. Then it will make a suggestion specific to your case, including the website structure, color, text, and images.

If you’re not satisfied with the suggestion, you can simply ask for all the changes you’d like to make. You don’t need to be an expert or know specific terms.

You can use natural language to create a conversation such as:

• You: “I don’t like the theme.”
• AI: “What don’t you like about it? What do you want me to change?”
• You: “I’d like it to be more elegant.”
• AI: “Ok, I’ll generate a more elegant theme for your website.”

This interaction will make you feel as if you were briefing a designer so they can come up with the best website for you. So, instead of spending hours looking at templates, you’ll get set up much faster.

Then, you can use AI tools for the rest of the process, too. There are text and image generators for you to populate your website with an SEO approach.

Another platform you can try is Squarespace. They’ve integrated an AI website generator called Blueprint AI. Instead of being an open chat like the one in Wix, you’ll start by answering a few questions.

Based on your answers, Blueprint AI will suggest personalized images, copy and designs. After you fine-tune these, it will generate a custom website.

Before choosing which website builder to use, review the different pricing plans. Don’t just go to the one with the cheapest starting plan or even a free tier.

Think ahead and consider how much it will cost to connect it with your own domain or increase the number of pages. Once your business grows, you often have to do your whole website from scratch because the best offer on the beginner tier is far from being the best when you upgrade.

Content

Once you have your website set up, you need to populate it with your own content. This used to be the part where most people struggled. While photographers have their own images, they might have problems with the text.

Writers, bloggers, and other professionals might be very skilled with the text, but struggle with the images, and so on. Then, even if you were very skilled at either one, you still needed to optimize it for your website to be found and get traffic.

So, AI tools can help with all these tasks. You can ask ChatGPT or other AI assistants to help you create a publishing calendar. This is because you want to showcase your most recent work and because Google likes new content. So, it will push you up in the search results.

You can also use these tools to generate or optimize your texts for SEO. There are specific tools for this as well, such as Jasper AI. You can also try Copy.ai, which is a GTM AI platform.

Here, you don’t simply create your content, but you can do company research, optimize workflows, connect teams and data, etc. Of course, this is more or less useful depending on the type of business you’re running.

For example, you can use it to create email campaigns or manage your social media profiles.

Last but not least, you can use AI to study the data from Google Analytics. This will help you understand how much traffic your website gets and whether this converts into actual business.

It’s also useful to analyze this data to understand the user journey and make the necessary adjustments to optimize it and gain more clients.

Client management

Client management is not a small part of running a photography business. Now, AI has come to help photographers in this crucial task.

Some website builders I covered earlier in the article have AI tools to help you schedule photo sessions. Squarespace is an excellent example.

For clients’ galleries, you can use Pic-Time, which adds a smart search tool that allows people to browse through your work in a fun and interactive way. This will engage clients to choose the best photos from their gallery and potentially buy more prints.

Of course, there are services that cover more than one task. The all-in-one photography CRM software from Honeybook is one of the best client management tools tailored for photographers.

In this package, you get some amazing AI features such as AI Notetaker. You can use this during your meetings with a client, and it will automatically pull out key information. This way, you’ll get all the highlights saved for later without getting distracted during the meeting.

Another tool to incorporate into your website is an AI chatbot. This will help you streamline interactions with clients as it can help with answering inquiries, managing bookings, or finding information on the website.

To create an AI chatbot, you can use Copilot.Live, Chatbot.com, or Tidio. They’re all very user-friendly and allow you to build a chatbot persona that matches your brand personality.