Website builder: build your photography website

Beta: free on every plan

Websites is in beta. It is complete enough to publish a real site (autosave, revision history, publish and unpublish all work), and it is free on every plan, including Free, while the beta lasts. The one thing not included is connecting your own domain, which uses the same custom domain feature as your galleries and stays on Plus and Pro. If that ever changes we will say so clearly and well ahead of time.

The ShootCal Website Builder turns the galleries and studio details you already manage into a simple client-facing website. It starts with five page slots (Home, Weddings, Engagements, Families, and Contact) that you can rename, reorder, hide, and restore. It keeps the native ShootCal gallery viewer for the actual photographs, favorites, downloads, and print store.

Open Galleries → Website to begin. A private starter appears first. Nothing is public until you press Publish.

Your published website lives at sites.shootcal.com/your-studio, where the last part is your ShootCal address name (change it under Gallery address in Galleries settings; an old website link keeps working), and your gallery portfolio stays at galleries.shootcal.com/your-studio. The two addresses never change meaning, so a link you have already given a client keeps pointing at the same thing. On a published site, sites.shootcal.com/your-studio/editor opens the builder, and ?page=weddings opens it on a particular page. The same works on a website custom domain. It is the studio address plus /editor, not any page address plus /editor.

Start with galleries and studio details

Create your normal client galleries first. Website gallery blocks can then use those galleries as cards, hero backgrounds, or embedded photo grids. Removing a gallery later removes only that missing reference from the website; it does not replace your other wording or layout.

Add a gallery to your website: which galleries the picker offers

The picker offers the galleries you have marked as Website galleries on the Galleries dashboard (described below). Both Public and Private link (unlisted) galleries can go in that set. Password-protected galleries cannot go on the website, because their photographs sit behind the password and a website is a public page.

Putting a private-link gallery in Website galleries is the deliberate step: placing it on the website makes it public to everyone who visits the site. Once the site is published, that gallery's photographs load for visitors and the card links to the gallery with its share link. The gallery itself stays unlisted everywhere else. If you would rather not show a piece of client work to strangers, leave it out of the website.

A gallery also has to be in good standing to appear: not on hold, not waiting on an ownership review, and not past its expiry date. A brand-new starter site only fills itself with Public galleries; nothing becomes visible to the public without you choosing it.

Website galleries: choose what the builder can place

Most studios use a handful of galleries on their website and hundreds for clients. On the Galleries dashboard you can mark any gallery as a Website gallery: click its access chip and choose Add to Website galleries, or select several and use the Add to Website galleries button. Those galleries move into their own Website galleries section at the top of the dashboard, carry a small "Website" badge, and are the galleries the builder's pickers offer.

Marking a gallery does not put it on your site by itself: nothing becomes public until you place the gallery on a page and press Publish. The mark is what fills the builder's pickers, so mark a gallery first when you want to place it on a page. A gallery already on a saved page keeps working even without the mark, and you can remove the mark the same way whenever you like.

Your website address and custom domain

Your shared ShootCal settings supply the studio identity and light/dark logos. The Website screen's Website address card shows where your site is published and is where you enter a custom www domain for it; your client galleries keep their own address under Galleries settings. Every published site has a permanent ShootCal address; a custom website domain is available on Plus and Pro, and is the one part of Websites the beta does not make free.

Edit pages and blocks

The main Website screen holds the choices that affect the whole site: studio name, logo, theme, page names and addresses, menu order, visibility, and search details. Each theme has a small static preview so choosing one does not have to load a second live website.

Choose Edit page beside the page you want. The editor then stays focused on that page's blocks: select text directly in the preview or select a block to open its settings, and drag blocks to reorder them. Back to Website returns to the main screen.

Home always stays first and uses the main website address. The other four pages can be renamed and given new addresses: for example, Families can become Newborn at /newborn. Hiding a page removes it from the published menu, sitemap, and public site without deleting its blocks or history. Restore it later and the content is still there.

Each page needs at least one section and can hold up to 40. If a page is emptied or grown past the limit, the editor says which page and why, and saving resumes as soon as it is back in range.

The builder includes:

• Studio sections: Hero, Featured galleries, Page link cards, ShootCal photo gallery, About, Testimonials, Availability calendar, and Contact.
• Layout: Container, Grid, Stack, and Space.
• Typography: Headline, Heading, rich Text, Buttons, and FAQ.

The main Website screen also holds the visual look, typeface, corner rounding, shadows, accent color, and page background. Keeping those site-wide choices outside the block editor leaves the editor's right column for the selected block. Use the preview width controls above the canvas to check each layout at phone, tablet, and desktop sizes, and the zoom controls beside them to see a whole long page at once.

The Audit tab in the left rail lists the headings on the page in order, so you can see at a glance whether the page reads as a sensible outline to search engines and screen readers.

Add photos and links

Upload a photograph for each hero, for the About block, and optionally for each testimonial and each page link card. Uploads are resized to 2560 px, re-encoded, and stripped of camera metadata (including any GPS coordinates) before they are stored, and each website keeps its own small image library. One picture belongs to one block: the row under the upload button shows it with a Delete control, and Replace image swaps it. Choose the focal point so the important part stays visible on different screens.

The About block shows its photograph at its natural shape by default. If you want a tidier frame, its Photo shape setting offers a square 1:1, portrait 4:5, or landscape 3:2 crop, and the Photo focus point decides which part of the picture the crop keeps.

Uploads, in the editor's top bar beside History, lists images you have uploaded that no block on any page uses any more, which is what Replace image leaves behind. Unused images still count toward the website's image limit and your storage, so delete the leftovers there once you are settled.

Testimonials holds one to nine quotes with an attribution each. A quote can carry a photograph of the client or one from their session; a quote without one publishes as a clean card, and the editor shows an Add photo frame so you can see which quotes still have room for a picture.

Page link cards each have a label, the page they open, an optional image override, and their own focus point. The cards keep every card's controls open; use the arrow buttons to reorder and Remove to drop one.

Heroes work best with a photograph that reads at its edges rather than a tight portrait, because the headline card sits over the middle of the frame. A ceremony in a garden, a room before guests arrive, or a wide stretch of coast will all hold up better behind text than a close portrait will.

Until you add your own photograph, a hero shows sample imagery in the builder so the page looks like a finished design rather than an empty frame. The samples are an editing aid only and never appear on your published site: a frame you have not filled publishes as a quiet tinted frame instead. Each sample carries an "Add your photo" watermark across the picture, so you can always see which pictures are still yours to replace.

Focal point: choose what stays in frame

A hero, and each page link card, is cropped differently on a wide desktop screen than on a narrow phone, so the interesting part of the photograph can drift out of view. Drag the focus point on the photograph to say what must stay visible. Once the marker has focus the arrow keys nudge it a percent at a time, or ten percent with Shift held.

You are marking a point on the picture, not on one crop. The same point drives every screen width, which is why the control shows the whole photograph rather than a preview of a single shape. Put it on the subject's face, or on whatever the picture is actually about.

Featured gallery and gallery-embed blocks use galleries from the same ShootCal studio; they do not copy the photos into a second system. Older sites may still show a gallery cover in a hero. Those keep working, and the block offers to switch to an uploaded image.

Buttons accept either a path on your own site beginning with / or a secure https:// address. Page-link cards can connect visitors to another website page, while gallery cards can open either a website category page or the full native ShootCal gallery.

Add availability and contact

The Availability calendar block embeds the public availability address created in ShootCal’s booking settings. In the ShootCal app go to Clients → Booking, turn the availability calendar on, and press Copy embed code. Paste that into the block. You can paste either the whole embed snippet or just the address inside it; both work. An address pointing anywhere other than ShootCal is refused. The Contact block shows your email, phone, Instagram, Facebook, and Google reviews as icon links (fill in whichever you want; the rest stay hidden), plus a simple inquiry form. When your site has an availability calendar (on that page or on the Contact page), the block also shows a short "check availability" prompt with a button to it; each block can hide the prompt or reword it. Contact-form messages are delivered through ShootCal without exposing private Galleries data.

Where website inquiries go

An inquiry is emailed to the email address on your Galleries account, with a subject beginning "New website inquiry" and the visitor's name. Replying to that email answers the visitor directly, because their address is set as the reply address. There is no separate inbox in Galleries to check, so the messages sit in your normal mail with everything else.

The form only works on a published site, and only when the Contact block's inquiry form is switched on. If you are testing on a draft, nothing will arrive.

A gallery or availability block you have not finished setting up does not appear on the published site at all. In the editor it shows what it still needs and says it is hidden until you do that; visitors simply never see the section. So an unfinished block costs you the whole section, not just its contents.

Autosave, checkpoints, and history

After you stop editing for about four seconds, the builder saves a recoverable autosave. Save checkpoint records a milestone you deliberately want in History. The History dialog lets you preview an older revision on every page before choosing Restore as draft.

Restoring never changes the live site. It creates a new draft, and the site changes publicly only after you press Publish again. History keeps the most recent 10 autosaves, 20 milestones, and the current live revision. Because autosaves roll over, press Save checkpoint before anything you want to be certain of returning to.

If the site is saved somewhere else while you are editing (another tab, another device, or a save from this tab whose reply never arrived), editing pauses instead of overwriting anything. You can Keep this version, which saves what is on screen as a checkpoint and leaves the other version in History, or reload and continue from the saved one.

Reset draft to starter replaces all five draft pages with ShootCal's current starter defaults. Your published site and your galleries are untouched, and the reset is itself a new draft you must publish to make public.

Page SEO: how each page appears in search

Every page can carry its own search title and description from the main Website screen. Leave them blank and the page uses its own heading and intro, which is what the site does by default; fill them in when you want to say something more specific than the page's own wording.

Aim for about 60 characters of title and 155 of description. The editor counts as you type and tells you when Google is likely to cut the text short. Longer text is allowed, it simply may not all be shown.

Give each page a specific title and description. This helps search engines understand which page matches a search, but it does not by itself guarantee a ranking.

Publish, search visibility, and unpublish

Turn on Allow search engines to list this website only if you want the website indexed, then press Publish. That search choice changes only when you publish and is separate from the Galleries collections-page visibility setting.

Use View live site to check the public result. Unpublish takes the website offline and sends visitors back to your Galleries portfolio; the draft and retained revision history remain available for publishing again later.

Write a link inside a paragraph

Hero introductions, the About story, the Contact invitation, and section introductions accept a link written as [the words you want linked](https://example.com). Only https:// addresses become links. Anything else stays as plain text exactly as you typed it, with no error, which is the usual reason a link does not appear.

The Text block is different: it has a small toolbar for bold, italic, links, and lists, deliberately limited so a website cannot drift away from its own design.

Page slots, header menu, and footer: what the beta does not do yet

The website has five page slots. You can rename, hide, restore, and reorder them, but you cannot add a sixth page or delete a slot permanently yet. A hidden page keeps its blocks and history, so trying a different site structure is reversible.

The header menu lists your pages, then a Recent work link to your public galleries page, then a mail icon for your Contact page; the studio name or logo is the way home. Recent work is on for every site and can be switched off under Pages on the Website screen. The footer is built in, lists every page in words, and carries a ShootCal credit on every plan while the beta lasts.

These are current limitations rather than decisions. If five flexible page slots still do not fit the way you work, say so, because that feedback is what the beta is for.

When the builder will not save

Saving covers all five pages at once, so a problem on a page you are not looking at still stops the save. Most messages now name the page and the rule, for example a page left with no sections at all.

A general "check the page for missing or invalid fields" message means something else is invalid. The fields that cannot be left blank are your studio name, the browser title and search description, each hero headline, every block heading, the About body, any Text body, each button label, each FAQ question and answer, and each page link card label. The fields that must be correct when filled are the contact email, social links, the availability address, and button links, which take either an https:// address or a path on your own site beginning with /.

Autosave slows down after a failure, so once you have fixed the field, press Save checkpoint rather than waiting to see whether it recovered.

A safe first workflow

1. Make two or three representative galleries public.
2. Open Website, choose the theme and logo, then rename, reorder, or hide pages to fit your work.
3. Open each visible page in the editor, replace the starter wording, and upload a hero photograph.
4. Return to Website and give each page its own search title and description.
5. Add the availability calendar and contact details.
6. Preview Phone, Tablet, and Desktop.
7. Save a checkpoint, then Publish.

For domain setup, see Custom domains. For gallery visibility, see Branding, privacy, and your studio page.