Gallery and portfolio pages

Group by the work, not the date

Visitors are looking for their own situation. Grouping by kitchen, bathroom, commercial or by property type lets somebody find work like theirs in seconds, which is the entire job of the page.

Date order serves the business and nobody else. It puts the most recent work first regardless of relevance, and it buries the best examples once a few months pass.

Label each group in the customer's words. Our page on search intent covers why matching their language matters more than using your internal categories.

Give each group its own page once it has enough material. A gallery hub linking to a page per kind of work outperforms one long scroll, and each page can then be found for the work it shows.

Caption everything

An image on its own tells a visitor almost nothing about whether you could do their job. A line saying what it was, what was involved and roughly how long it took turns a picture into evidence.

That caption is also the only part of the image an answer engine or a screen reader can use. Our page on alt text covers the description, which is a separate job from the caption.

Where you can, add roughly what it cost or what determined the cost. That single detail answers the question most visitors are holding while they scroll.

Write the caption at the job rather than months later. The detail that makes a photograph persuasive is exactly the detail nobody remembers once the van has left the site.

Keep it fast

Galleries are where small business sites become unusable on a phone. Full-size photographs dropped straight onto a page produce something that takes many seconds to load and loses the visitor before anything appears.

Resize to the dimensions actually displayed, compress, and load images below the fold only when needed. Our page on page speed covers the order to work in.

Set width and height on every image so the layout does not jump as they arrive, which our page on layout shift describes.

What every gallery entry needs

The list below is what turns a grid into evidence. Most galleries carry the first item alone, which is why they are scrolled past rather than read.

• A caption saying what the work was
• The kind of property or setting
• What was involved, briefly
• Roughly how long it took
• The town or area, where permitted
• Alt text describing what the image shows
• A route to enquire about similar work

How many images

Fewer and better. A gallery of twenty strong photographs outperforms one of two hundred, because the average is what a visitor judges and nobody reaches the end of a long grid.

Prune as better work arrives. Removing the weakest entries improves the page without any new photography, and it is the cheapest improvement available.

Keep the groups balanced. A gallery with forty kitchens and two bathrooms tells a bathroom customer they are not your usual work, whether or not that is true.

Permission and identifying detail

Get written permission before publishing images of somebody's property, and be specific about where they will appear. Verbal agreement on site is not enough when a customer later objects.

Check each photograph for things you did not notice: house numbers, vehicle plates, documents, personal possessions and people in the background.

Our page on images and copyright covers the records to keep, including rights where a photographer took the pictures.

Portfolios for creative work

The same rules apply with one addition: show the brief as well as the outcome. A client is assessing judgment, and an image without the problem it solved demonstrates taste rather than thinking.

Our page on case studies covers the longer form. A portfolio and a set of case studies do different jobs and the strongest creative sites carry both.

Keep the work current and remove anything you would no longer produce. A portfolio is judged by its weakest piece more than its best.