How to Show Off Your Carpentry Work on Your Website

Your work is the strongest argument you have. Most carpentry websites waste it — a single gallery of dark, crooked photos with no context, buried three clicks down.

Photograph every job to the same recipe

1. Before. Take it before you unload the ute. You'll never get it back.
2. During. One shot of the framing or the structure going in.
3. Wide finished shot. The whole thing, in context, in daylight.
4. Detail shots. Joins, fixings, edges — where the craftsmanship lives.
5. Wider setting shot. How the work sits with the rest of the house.

The five rules that make phone photos look professional

• Tidy up first — offcuts, tools and cords ruin an otherwise good photo.
• Shoot in the morning or late afternoon; midday sun blows out timber grain.
• Hold the phone level. Crooked verticals read as sloppy, even subconsciously.
• Get low or step back rather than zooming.
• Take more than you need. It costs nothing and you'll only choose three.

Organise by project, not by photo

A visitor wants to see one complete job, understood, before moving to the next. Give each project its own block: title, suburb, a short description, and four to six photos.

Write two or three sentences per project

Say what the customer wanted, what you built, the materials, and anything tricky you solved. "Merbau deck with a hardwood substructure, stepped down to follow a sloping backyard in Ashgrove — completed in nine days" tells a prospective customer far more than "Deck build".

Put your best work where people actually look

Six of your best projects on the home page, and relevant projects on each service page — decks on the decking page, fit-outs on the commercial page. A portfolio hidden behind a menu item barely gets opened.

Keep it current

Add a project every month or two. A portfolio where the newest job is from 2022 raises exactly the question you don't want raised.

Don't use other people's work

No stock deck photos, no supplier images passed off as yours, no photos from a former employer's jobs without permission. Someone always recognises it, and a portfolio's whole value is that it's true.

If your current site makes adding projects a chore, that's worth fixing — see Carpenter Website Design, or what a carpenter's website should include.