My honest experience with theDesign.Website for Birth & Family Photography

As a birth and family photographer, I know how important it is to have a website that feels personal and welcoming-something that reflects the emotional stories behind every newborn session and family portrait. Recently, I tried out The Design Website — a design blog discussing design disciplines, including the use of photography, to see if it could help me refresh my online presence. Here’s my honest take, including both the good and the not-so-great.

What I liked

Lots of Templates, But…
TheDesign.Website offers a huge variety of templates, which is great if you want options. I found several layouts that could work for showcasing my birth photography and family sessions. The templates are modern and visually appealing, and they do a decent job of highlighting photos. For anyone just starting out, this could save a lot of time compared to building a site from scratch.

Easy Customization
Changing colors, fonts, and images is pretty straightforward. I liked being able to tweak things to match my brand, and the drag-and-drop editor is user-friendly. If you’re not super tech-savvy, you’ll probably appreciate this.

Mobile-Friendly
One thing I always check is how my site looks on a phone, since most parents are browsing on mobile. TheDesign.Website does a solid job here-my galleries and contact forms looked good on smaller screens.

Where It fell short

Not really tailored for photographers
While there are a lot of templates, I didn’t find many that felt truly designed for birth or family photographers. Most templates are pretty generic, and I had to do a lot of tweaking to get things just right. Features like proofing galleries, client portals, or integrated booking systems-things that are super important for photographers-aren’t really built in.

AI features are hit or miss
TheDesign.Website advertises AI-generated content and images, but I found these tools pretty basic. The auto-generated “About Me” text was generic and needed a lot of editing to sound authentic. The AI images didn’t really fit my style or the emotional tone of birth and newborn photography.

Limited support and resources
When I ran into a couple of issues (like slow loading times on my photo galleries), I found the support resources a bit lacking. There’s a help section, but it’s not as comprehensive as some other platforms I’ve used. If you’re someone who likes a lot of tutorials or one-on-one help, you might find this frustrating.

Final thoughts

Would I recommend TheDesign website to other birth and family photographers? Maybe-as a starting point. If you need something quick, affordable, and relatively easy to set up, it’s not a bad option. But if you want a website that really captures the heart of your photography business, with features tailored for client galleries, bookings, and storytelling, you might outgrow it pretty fast.

For now, I’m keeping my site here while I explore other options. If you’re considering TheDesign.Website, go in with realistic expectations: it’s decent for a basic online portfolio, but you’ll need to put in extra work to make it truly shine for your birth and family photography business.

If you’ve tried TheDesign website or have other recommendations for photographer-friendly website builders, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!