NEW YORK, NY (February 19, 2009) – PhotoShelter surveyed 581 editorial and commercial photography buyers at magazines, advertising agencies, book publishers, and corporate design groups to find out what they say they love or hate about photographers' Web sites.
The company is sharing the results with the photography community online here for free.
"We also used the data to fine tune the design and features on our own Web site templates," Andrew Fingerman said. He's the vice president of marketing for PhotoShelter. "And we gave our home page a nice facelift, with great a 'great examples' tab showing how photographers are succeeding with PhotoShelter."
Those interested in the survey's results can get a free copy of the report in Acrobat PDF format, sent to them via eMail.
The survey was eMailed to 32,000 image buyers around the world in December 2008. It was completed online. The results were compiled from 581 commercial and editorial buyers who were verified by PhotoShelter.
Some examples of the results include 48 percent of buyers saying that would rather price images online, and that 96 percent of them "hate" a Flash-based introduction to photographers' Web sites. A nearly identical number dislike textured or graphical site backgrounds.
The survey also found that 50 percent of buyers will "give up" if the site takes more than 10 seconds to load; more than 15 seconds and 71 percent stop looking.
The survey contains information about what size images designers prefer to see on Web sites, watermarks, features, image access and delivery, and online buying.
Some examples of photography Web sites that match the features most liked by buyers in the survey include the sites done by Stock Scotland and Art Wolfe.
