Website builder: build your photography website

Pages included in your plan

Every plan can edit all six page slots, with the same blocks, slider headers, and eight looks. Permanent Free hosting includes Home and an optional Contact page. Basic ($5/month) hosts all six pages with the same 10 GB storage as Free for new accounts. Plus and Pro also host all six pages and include custom domains; Basic does not include domains or other paid Galleries features.

New accounts receive six calendar months of Basic Website access from their ShootCal signup date, with no card required and no automatic charge. At expiry, already-published Home and enabled Contact remain public on the included ShootCal address, while extra pages stop being public. Pages, uploaded images, and retained history stay saved and editable. A hidden Contact page stays hidden, and a draft is never published automatically. If you choose paid hosting after access expires, press Publish to make the extra pages public again.

Accounts that existed before the Website rollout retain their promised ongoing full Website access, even if they had not yet created a website. Existing storage promises also remain in place; retained Website access does not add paid Galleries features or custom domains.

The ShootCal Website Builder uses the galleries and studio details you already manage. Rename, reorder, hide, or restore your pages and keep the same gallery viewer for photographs, favorites, downloads, and prints. Choose the Photography starter for gallery sections, About, FAQ, Instagram, and contact information, or choose Simple Light or Simple Dark for a simpler website with an optional Contact page and form. Remove any section you do not need. Empty galleries and an unconnected Instagram feed stay hidden from visitors. These defaults apply to new sites or an explicit starter reset; existing pages keep their chosen blocks. If you have no eligible gallery yet, choose one in the editor when you are ready. Unused pages can stay hidden; rename a page and turn on Shown when you want to use it, then publish when it is ready and your hosting includes it.

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 Link only (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.

Adding a Link only gallery to Website galleries makes it available to the builder. Placing it on a page and publishing the site is what shows it to visitors. Its photographs then load on the website, and its card opens the gallery with its share link. The gallery stays unlisted on your public galleries page. Only place work on the website that you intend to share publicly.

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. Default header and footer logos keep their natural proportions, with responsive size limits for square and wide artwork. This does not change the sizes or crops you choose for image blocks. 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. Basic and the new-account trial use the included ShootCal address.

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. Choose from Glass Light, Glass Dark, Editorial Light, Editorial Dark, Aperture Light, Aperture Dark, Simple Light, and Simple Dark. Each look has a small preview, and all eight are available on every plan during the beta.

Under Theme, turn on Let visitors choose light or dark mode in the footer to add a small Appearance selector to your site. Choose Light, Dark, or System as the default. System follows the visitor’s device setting, and a visitor’s choice is remembered in that browser. The saved appearance keeps your custom colors; its alternate uses the matching theme colors. This option starts off on existing and new sites. Save Theme Settings, then publish when you want visitors to see the change.

Use Save Identity Settings, Save Theme Settings, or Save Page Settings in the section you changed. Each saves only that section to your draft; Publish applies the draft and pending settings to the live site. 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.

In Text and Feature section blocks, select the words you want to link and choose Link. Enter a website address beginning with https:// or http://, or a plain email address, check Link text, then choose Add link. To change an existing link, place the cursor in it and choose Link again; use Save link to update it or Remove link to keep the words without the link.

Home always stays first and uses the main website address. The other five editable page slots 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 sections, 150 blocks in total (including blocks inside containers, grids, and stacks), and 300 photos across its sections. Gallery covers, slider photographs, and embedded gallery photos all count toward the photo total; placing a photo twice counts twice. If a page is emptied or grown past a limit, the editor says which page and what to change, and saving resumes as soon as it is back in range.

A ShootCal photo gallery block shows up to 200 photos within that page total. If a gallery grows after you publish, the page keeps its headings and individually placed images, shows the gallery photos that fit, and offers View full gallery for the rest. Use a link to the full gallery when you want visitors to browse more work.

The builder includes:

• Studio sections: Hero, Slider header, 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 photographs for headers, the About block, and optionally for testimonials and page link cards. Choose a JPEG, PNG, or WebP file up to 25 MB. ShootCal prepares WebP copies up to 800 px and 2048 px on the longest edge, without enlarging smaller originals, and strips camera metadata (including any GPS coordinates) before they are stored. These ready-to-display copies are kept with your website on ShootCal's SSD storage. Thumbnails use smaller files, headers use the larger copy, and About and testimonial photos let the browser choose the size suited to the screen.

Each website has its own library of up to 60 active directly uploaded images, shared across all its pages. Photos shown from your galleries do not use this upload allowance. Replace image swaps a block's photograph; deleting an image is refused while a saved draft or published page still uses it. Choose the focal point so the important part stays visible on different screens, and add a short image description for visitors using a screen reader.

Direct uploads use readable image addresses based on the uploaded filename, with a size suffix such as family-portrait-grid.webp or family-portrait-preview.webp. Spaces and punctuation become hyphens. Existing uploads receive these addresses automatically; older image links continue to work. Photographs pulled from a gallery keep their current image addresses. Image descriptions remain separate from filenames.

Add a slider header

Add Slider header from the block list, then use Add image to upload up to eight photographs. One photograph works as a still header; add two or more for a slideshow. Arrange them in the order you want, add your heading, introduction, and optional button, then choose the text alignment and size. Slider headers work with every look and on any page included in your plan. Aperture starters use sliders on the portfolio pages and a regular header on Contact.

Under Text placement, choose Below photos to keep each photograph's full shape with the heading underneath, or Over photos to place the heading over a cropped frame. New slider blocks start with text below. Existing sliders keep their saved layout. In the Over photos layout, set a focus point for each frame; adjusting it brings that frame into the editor preview so you can check the crop.

Header height lets you choose a percentage of the screen height or return to Automatic. With text below, the height is a maximum: photos also fit the available width, so wide photographs on a phone do not sit inside a tall empty space. The same setting adapts to desktop, tablet, and phone screens; you do not need separate heights for each device. The photo area keeps a consistent height as the slides change.

Photographs slide horizontally while your heading and button stay in place. Visitors can move through them with the arrows or a swipe. You can leave automatic rotation off or enable the slow slideshow. The compact controls include play/pause and arrows. Automatic rotation starts after the first photograph loads, changes about every five seconds, and respects the visitor's reduced-motion preference. Resting the pointer over the header does not stop it; keyboard focus pauses it while you use the controls. It stays still while you edit so the photograph does not move beneath your cursor.

Check both desktop and phone previews. With text over the photos, keep faces away from the heading and adjust each focus point as needed. With text below, check how the different photo shapes sit together.

Marsh & Magnolia shows slider headers on its portfolio pages and a regular header on Contact. It is a fictional example studio; its inquiry forms do not deliver messages.

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 active uploads still count toward the 60-image library allowance and your storage, so delete the leftovers there once you are settled. Only images placed on a page count toward that page's 300-photo allowance.

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, their own photo, and a focus point. Upload a photo for each card and adjust its focus in the same preview. Changing the linked page keeps the card photo. Existing gallery-based cards continue to work. 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.

Empty photo areas in Hero, About, and Page link cards show simple color gradients in the editor. Add your own photograph to fill them.

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 shows your ShootCal booking page. Turn on your booking page in Booking Setup in the ShootCal app (add your session types first); the block then places your calendar automatically, with nothing to paste. If you want the block to show a different ShootCal feed, you can paste a ShootCal embed snippet or just its address; 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

By default, an inquiry is emailed to your verified ShootCal account email. Select a Contact block in the editor to see Form messages are sent to and its current address. Choose Change delivery email to use a different inbox. Open the verification email and confirm while signed in; messages keep going to the existing address until you confirm. This changes all website inquiry forms, but does not change your login. Use account email switches delivery back to your verified account address.

The Public email field is a separate clickable link shown in that Contact block. Edit it right there, or leave it blank to hide the link. Changing it does not redirect inquiry-form messages.

Each inquiry arrives 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 six draft pages with your chosen Photography, Simple Light, or Simple Dark starter. For a Simple starter, choose whether to include a Contact page and form. 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.

With indexing off, the published pages ask search engines to leave them out of results. They are still public to anyone with the link. Keep work in a draft if it should not be public. Search engines decide when to crawl a page and whether to include it in results; turning indexing on does not guarantee a listing or a particular position.

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.

Show your Instagram feed

The Instagram feed block shows recent posts from your connected Instagram account. It is available on every plan. You need a professional Instagram account linked to a Facebook Page and a Facebook login that can access that Page.

1. On the Website screen, find Instagram feed and choose Connect Instagram.
2. Complete the Facebook connection and grant access to the Page linked to your Instagram account. If more than one account is available, choose the one this website should use.
3. Open the page in the builder and select its Instagram feed block, or add one if needed. Set Initial images from one to six, choose Columns from one to six, and write a heading. View more button reveals more cached posts on the page; View more link shows a link to your Instagram profile.
4. Leave Include hashtags (optional, separated by commas) and Exclude hashtags (optional, separated by commas) blank to show recent posts, or enter hashtags from your own captions to select or omit posts. For example, include wedding or #wedding to show matching posts from your connected account. This does not search other Instagram accounts.
5. Preview the page, then Publish when you are ready to show the block on your website.

Each photo opens its original Instagram post. The feed refreshes in the background, so new posts may take time to appear. The on-page View more button uses cached posts and does not request fresh posts from Instagram. The builder explains when the first feed is still being prepared, no posts match a hashtag, or Instagram needs to be reconnected. A feed with no usable posts stays hidden on the public page.

You can reconnect or disconnect from the Instagram feed card on the Website screen. Disconnecting removes the connection and cached posts without deleting your website. The Contact block can still link to your Instagram profile without a feed connection.

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

The website has six page slots. You can rename, hide, restore, and reorder them, but you cannot add a seventh 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 links to your visible public pages and shows a Contact icon only when Contact is enabled. The studio name or logo is the way home. Recent work links to your public galleries page and can be shown or hidden under Pages on the Website screen. Photography starters show it by default; Simple starters hide it by default. The footer is built in and links to your visible public pages. It shows a ShootCal credit by default. On Pro, use Identity → ShootCal footer credit → Hide ShootCal credit, save Identity Settings, then publish to apply the change.

These are current limitations rather than decisions. If six 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 your 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.