At its core, photography is about sharing images with others. Throughout the history of photography, prints and books have been the time-honored way to showcase work and get it out into the world. More recently, websites have taken center stage for sharing photographer’s images.
When done well, websites should showcase your creative work professionally and communicate your personal style and individuality, helping you to stand out from the crowd. This cannot be achieved with a standard page on a free site, using a template that looks like a million others.
Designing your own website, regardless of platform, allows you to start with a great design theme and customize this in a way that matches with your own style and vision. There are many options available to create a basic portfolio site, but unless one has a foundational understanding of web development, these various platforms often seem intimidating.
This online workshop led by photographer and web designer Cotton Miller demystifies building your own website and provides a step-by-step process through the terminology and workflows that translate through all web platforms. Cotton discusses the information and structure that is needed to have a well-designed, and user-friendly portfolio site. In addition, feedback from the other photographers in the workshop provides valuable perspectives on how effective your website is to users visiting your site.
The workshop is for photographers who have portfolios that are ready to be used in a web design. Cotton works with each participant to create a broad design overview for these portfolios, which provide a visual consistency throughout your site. He also covers important topics such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), assigning a URL to your new website, as well as a broad overview of basic design rules to give you confidence to make updates, and expand your new website.
Conceive, customize, and ultimately control your own website by designing it yourself in five weeks, with the expert advice and guidance of Cotton Miller—as well as feedback from the other nine photographers in the workshop.
This is a technical class and participants should have general knowledge of file preparation and resizing of images from Lightroom and/or Photoshop.
Class will meet 9:30 – 11:30 am (Mountain Time) on Wednesdays starting August 21 and ending September 18 (five online group sessions). Also included are 15-minute, one-on-one check-in sessions with Cotton each week. Enrollment is limited to 10 participants.
Zoom Video Conferencing software (available for no charge from Zoom.com) will be used to facilitate the class sessions. Further details will be emailed to registrants.
Santa Fe Workshops always aims to produce a high-quality experience for our online attendees. That said, variables including regional and local internet provider speeds, traffic on Zoom's servers, and your own computing hardware can contribute to a less than ideal streaming event. While we do our best to minimize the impact of these variables, they are outside the control of Santa Fe Workshops.
View Withdrawal and Transfer Policies for online programs.
For the convenience of participants, recordings of each class session are posted privately for one month after the end of each session. Santa Fe Workshops takes the recordings down after one month to protect the intellectual property of our instructors.
Cotton Miller received his MFA in Photography & New Media in 2013 from Lesley University College of Art and Design, in Boston. In addition to being honored by The Boston Globe as one of six artists to watch in 2013, he had multiple exhibits in Boston and has won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Texas Intercollegiate Press Association in 2007.
Cotton is the Web Manager for Santa Fe Workshops and does web consultation projects for a variety of artists. He has designed websites for Nevada Wier, Christopher James, Alison Wright, Elizabeth Opalenik, and Santa Fe Workshops. Cotton’s personal work combines traditional printing methods with digital, alternative process, mixed media, and multimedia. He worked as a master printer for Blazing Editions in Providence and Cotton was a research assistant for The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes (third edition) by Christopher James. Cotton collaborates with many artists for not only web design, but also digital retouching, graphic design, exhibition design, exhibition production, and printing fine art editions.
Website: cottonmiller.com
Instagram: @cottonmiller
