Your Photos Are Your Design

The template isn't what makes a band's site look cheap. Five mismatched photos are. What actually makes a press photo work on a website.

Almost every band site that looks bad looks bad because of the photos.

Not the font. Not the layout. Not whatever platform it's built on. Somebody picked a good theme, dropped in a hero image cropped from a phone photo taken in a basement, and the whole thing collapsed. Meanwhile the bands whose sites look expensive are usually running the same three design ideas everyone else is — big type, a lot of black, one enormous picture. The difference is that their picture can hold the weight.

A website is mostly a frame. You are supplying the thing inside it.

What a website needs that your camera roll doesn't have

Your phone shoots vertical, tight, and just big enough for Instagram. A website wants the opposite of all three.

Horizontal, with room to spare. A hero image spans the full width of a laptop screen. If the only wide shot you have is a vertical photo cropped down, you lose everyone's heads or everyone's feet. Shoot wide, and leave more empty space around the band than feels right. That empty space is where your name goes.

Big files. A full-bleed hero on a modern display needs something in the neighborhood of 2400 pixels across before it starts looking soft. A screenshot from a text thread is 900. There's no way to add the missing pixels back later, and every "why does it look blurry on my laptop" conversation traces back to this.

Two crops of the same moment. Phones are vertical and most of your visitors are on phones. The shot that works as a wide desktop hero almost never works as a tall phone hero. Get both from the same setup, same light, same afternoon, so the site doesn't feel like it changes bands when you rotate the screen.

The set matters more than the best shot

This is the part bands skip. You've got one photo you love — the good one, the one on the poster. Then the site needs four more and you go digging, and what comes back is a shot from last summer with the old bass player, a live photo lit entirely in red, and a black-and-white one from the first EP.

Five photos from three different shoots don't read as five photos. They read as three different bands.

You don't need great photos. You need a set: same people, same era, same color, taken close enough together that a stranger scrolling the page understands they're looking at one group of humans who currently play music with each other. A consistent mediocre set beats one great photo surrounded by chaos, every time.

The version that costs nothing

No budget, no photographer, one afternoon:

• One friend with an actual camera, not a phone.
• One overcast day. Flat gray sky is the cheapest softbox in existence. Direct sun at noon is the enemy.
• One location. One set of clothes. Don't change anything halfway through — that's how you end up with two shoots instead of one.
• Shoot horizontal for most of it, then rotate and shoot the same setups vertical.
• Take five times more frames than you think you need. Storage is free.

Then, before anyone opens an editing app, make a list of what you're actually trying to come away with. Something like: one wide group shot with air around it, one vertical of the same, one tighter group, one candid that doesn't look posed, one detail that isn't people at all — a hand on a fretboard, an amp, the room. That last one is what saves you when a page needs a background and you've already used all the faces.

Hand that list to whoever's shooting before the shoot. It's a five-minute conversation that determines whether your site works.

A word on live photos

Everyone wants the live shot as the hero. Usually it can't carry it. Stage light is red, the room is dark, and the photo was taken from the third row by someone holding a beer. Live photos are great further down the page, where they prove you actually play shows. Up top, you want the one where people can see your faces.

When you hand them off

Send the original files. Not the ones you exported for Instagram, not the ones that went through a text message, not links to your own posts. Full resolution, straight off the card. Include the logo as an SVG or a transparent PNG if you have one — a logo screenshotted off your own merch will look like exactly that.

And get it in writing from the photographer that you can use the images on your website and give them to venues and press. Not a contract, just a message you can find later. Bookers reuse whatever you send them, and you want that to be fine.

The whole point

A cheap site with a strong, consistent set of photos looks like a band with a plan. An expensive site with five mismatched snapshots looks like a school project. The photos are the one part nobody else can do for you — and they're the part that decides how everything else lands.

Go shoot on the next gray afternoon.