Photocrati » Photography Websites

Your Photography Website Is Pretty, But Will It Get You Clients?

Editor — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 11:00:00 +0000

I’ve seen photographers spend piles of money on lovely photography websites with lots of fading images, music tracks, pretty pages and more.

I often wonder how good those websites are at converting a visitor into a potential client?

The “pretty factor” helps, sure. But what other elements can help a photography website: generate a visitor, engage them enough to cause them to stick (or return), and, ultimately, to get them to convert into a phone call, email or web form submission.

I spent the past eight years studying a variety of websites across hundreds of industries, not just photography. I’ve put together a list of things that I’ve seen be the most successful.

Three ways to ensure your photography website is performing to its fullest potential

1. Is anyone visiting?

A pretty website is worthless if no one, or not enough people, visit it. How much is enough? There is no “enough”.

I personally believe that in order to continue to be successful in your business, your website traffic should be higher this month than it was last month or higher this year than it was last year. For those of you in seasonal businesses, perhaps the comparison of same months within prior years is most relevant, where more steady photography businesses can just look month over month within the same year.

If you have no idea how many visitors are coming to your website, use Jetpack or Google Analytics or see if your hosting provider offers a stat package.

How often should you watch your website traffic?

Once a week is sufficient. You should be looking for a few things:

Where are people coming from? (ie what sources are they coming from? Facebook, Pinterest, Email programs, etc?)
What search terms are they using to find your website? (i.e., are people only Googling your name? Or are they searching and finding you using more general terms?
What is the quantity of traffic and how does it compare to last year, last month, etc?

2. If people aren’t visiting or finding you, fix something (or a lot of things)

Obviously I could write a dissertation on website SEO. If you’re really into optimizing your website for search, check out this amazing community here. I would write about SEO more, but I’d rather leave that topic to the experts.

People not finding you could be because of poor SEO. It could also be because of any number or combination of the following:

Your overall reach in social media needs to be improved (get more fans or followers!)
You need to post more links from social to your site (give those fans and followers a reason to visit your site!)
You need to get more links to your website listed (naturally) on other websites (a great way to do this is by guest blogging!)

3. You need to blog (or blog more)

Most photographers run a blog on their own website. But I believe the target audience for future clients is often lost in the process.

Take a look at your own blog and evaluate it based on these simple questions:

Does my ideal future client find anything of value in my blog?
Do my posts help my ideal future client make a better decision about purchasing photography (hopefully from me)?
Does my blog truly speak to the needs of my future client?

Editors note: What’s your blogging strategy?

If the answer to those questions is “no”, then you may be using your blog as a diary of what you’ve done.

Instead, consider using your blog to diary ways in which your clients prepared for a shoot, participated in a shoot by holding a prop or light reflector, added to the fun of a shoot or any other idea that might help your future client see what a shoot with you can be like.

Educating your future client is key.

There is an insanely overwhelming list of things that new photographers need to learn as they launch their photography business. A website that converts visitors to potential clients is just one of them!

I recently wrote a brief e-book titled: The Art Of A Photo Business: What Every Photographer Wished They Learned Before Starting Their Photography Business. It contains marketing advice, business tips and miscellaneous motivational “umph” for every single photographer seeking a better way to approach their business. Photocrati readers get it for just $7 until 4/30/13. Buy it by clicking here and use coupon code LH48A.

Angela Pointon is the founder of Steel Toe Images, which offers marketing advice and inspiring motivation for photography business owners. She recently published her first book, The Art of a Photo Business. Find her on her blog, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

Make Your Photography Website Print Friendly

Scott — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 11:00:00 +0000

Have you been wanting to add a cleaner print experience for your website visitors?

In the video below, you will see how you can add a simple CSS script in your Photocrati theme’s Dynamic CSS area.

Here is the PrintFriendly button I mentioned in the article.

Here is the snippet of CSS that you can paste in your Dynamic CSS section.

If you have any questions please feel free to comment below.

Thanks for reading,
Scott

What Baby Toys Can Teach You About Photography Websites

Scott — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 12:00:34 +0000

There is such an overwhelming amount of photography website designs around the Internet. Sometimes in life, we get inspired by the strangest things. In this article you will see how a simple baby toy inspired some insights into photography websites.

My nephew was playing with this musical toy and certain things the toy did sparked some thoughts.

Keep your colors consistant - This toy has so much going on with color. Of course, because it’s a baby toy the colors are meant to trigger certain responses. A photography website color scheme should be simple so that the color in the photographs are drawing the viewers eye.
Music – This toy is meant for a child to hear and play music. My nephew already loves music, so when he plays with the toy he also dances. A photography website can have music, but think about the audience before setting it to auto-play. Will your audience enjoy the music?
Things to touch – Baby toys have so much to touch. Things move, open, make noise and have texture. A photography website should also have things to touch, but in an organized way. Keep the layout clean and have a focus so your visitors do what you want.
Durability – Most baby toys, like the one you see in the photo above, are built to last. Make sure you are using a well designed and thought out WordPress photography theme and use the best website hosting for photographers so you’re website is safe.

Now it’s your turn. Think about a toy and comment below with what it teaches you about supercharging your photography websites.

Thanks for reading,

Scott

A WordPress Photography Theme Built With Photographers In Mind

Scott — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 12:00:38 +0000

Photocrati is a WordPress photography theme, as you know. You are most likely asking yourself why we’re saying that the Photocrati theme is a WordPress photography theme built with photographers in mind? You might even say “duh” to something like that. So I will explain.

You see, photographers, as you might expect, do not want to deal with website customizations. In addition, the typical photographer wants a WordPress photography theme that has necessary features and functionality, control over their photographs, the ability to sell their work and of course, branding control without having to learn website design.

There are two questions that we are asked very often. The first is “How hard is it to customize my website with Photocrati?” It is actually extremely simple to customize your website with the Photocrati theme. In fact, most design changes are a couple clicks and you’re done. The second question is “Do I need to download additional themes or files?” One of the beautiful things about the Photocrati theme is that the each of the 60 presets we offer are built-in to one product. That means if you decided to customize your design or change presets, you do not need to download any new files.

WordPress Photography Theme Video

Now, instead of writing a very long article on this topic, I decided to record a video so you, as a photographer, can do what you do best… visualize.

So as you can see, our WordPress photography theme was developed with the idea that photographers should not worry about customizations. We made it extremely simple and visual. The Photocrati theme is made is so you can get back to shooting.

See live examples of the Photocrati theme by visiting:

Photocrati Demos
Photocrati Showcase
Photocrati Showcase on Pinterest

If you would like to see more behind the scenes of Photocrati, read the article, WordPress Portfolio Themes For Creatives and see how the Photocrati gallery management system can simplify your website.

Feel free to comment with your questions.

Thanks for reading and viewing,
Scott

WordPress Gallery Themes Made Easy

Scott — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 11:00:46 +0000

There are a lot of WordPress gallery themes on the market. So you may be wondering what sets Photocrati apart from the competition.

First and foremost, the Photocrati theme is much more than just a WordPress gallery theme. In fact, in addition to beautiful galleries and management functionality, it also includes:

eCommerce
Blogging
60+ theme styles
Social profiles
Integration with the leading WordPress gallery plugin

When looking for WordPress gallery themes, ideally want something with a dedicated tool for managing and displaying your galleries. Many of the free and premium themes on the market use custom post types to manage galleries. While this can be effective, it’s not something that novice WordPress users might understand. Photographers by nature are visual people, so having a system that visually guides users through the gallery creation process is important.

That is why the Photoctati theme has its own built-in gallery management system.

As you can see, the Photocrati gallery management system is extremely simple to understand.

Set your gallery title
Set your gallery description
Pick your gallery display style
Pick your gallery aspect ratio
Upload images or import from NextGEN Gallery
Set Meta Data titles and descriptions for each photo
Set eCommerce options for each photo

By having a gallery management system, users will not have to think about custom post types in WordPress, styling in CSS or finding plugins With this visual style, it makes Photocrati a great choice for those searching for WordPress gallery themes.

Want to see more?

Visit the Photocrati Showcase Board on Pinterest to see examples from Photocrati users.
Visit the Photocrati Demos page
Visit the official Photocrati Showcase page
Visit the article WordPress Portfolio Themes For Creatives

Thanks for reading

Advanced Web Hosting For Photographers That Need Expansion

Editor — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 11:00:01 +0000

In a previous article on the Best Web Hosting for Photographers and WordPress, we mentioned how Bluehost is the ideal choice, and how Dreamhost is also a very good choice.

To sum it up, Bluehost is a great choice because:

Minimal down time
Great customer service
Ease of Use
WordPress-friendly
Unlimited domains, website, and space
Popularity
Price

However, even with all that said – sometimes a photographer may outgrow a hosting company like Bluehost. For example, Photocrati’s Scott, was using Dreamhost (similar hosting style to Bluehost) for many years. Eventually his grew to the point where consistent traffic continually crashed the server.

So Scott had to make a conscious decision to change hosts, and turned to more advanced options that require some knowledge of how servers function and how to maintain them. Since making the move, new hosting styles have emerged from the abyss of infinite web hosting options. Termed: Managed WordPress Hosting.

Basically, these hosting platforms are cloud-esq virtual private servers that are managed entirely by the hosting company for the utmost speed, reliability and performance. In addition, they’re optimized specifically for WordPress so problems should not exists.

Web Hosting For Photographers

In the Managed WordPress Hosting space, there are two companies that stand out above them all. We have had the fortunate opportunity to take a deeper look at both and feel comfortable, like we do with Bluehost, to recommend either for web hosting for photographers.

WP Engine

It is safe to say that WP Engine is the most popular management WordPress hosting solution on the market. In fact, soon enough they could become the most popular advanced web hosting for photographers. They’re used by some of the most familiar technology brands around, like FourSquare and HTC.

WP Engine prides itself on speed, security and scalability. Due to the cloud style hosting, the speed of a website hosted with WP Engine will be lightning fast. The platform has been designed specifically for WordPress driven websites, so downtime should be minimal if not eliminated completely. The developers at WP Engine have taken every security precaution they can to keep their customer’s websites safe, and has made it clear that they use a third-party security company to handle testing. It is unclear, however, if they have the third-party handle regular scans or hack restoration or whether they do it in-house.

The nature of a cloud infrastructure lets WP Engine easily increase their storage limit with a few clicks. Of course, with more storage comes more fees. There are a couple of WP Engine features that are worth pointing out.

The first is the ability to connect an Amazon S3 account for scalability without increasing your WP Engine plan. Another feature is the option for using WP Engine’s CDN (content delivery network) so bigger files, and photographs are delivered from another cloud server for increased speed and durability. A really neat feature is the curated plugins list that WP Engine provides. Inside are plugins that WP Engine has tested and will gladly support on their servers. The others are plugins that they do not support and will not let customer’s activate.

For photographers interested in WP Engine, they do provide migration for free, so if you need a website moved from Bluehost then there are no additional fees.

Web hosting for photographers on WP Engine starts at $29 a month.

Synthesis

Synthesis is a product of Copyblogger who also developed Scribe SEO. Synthesis prides itself on being the fastest, most secure and with the greatest expertise. Synthesis is a managed Linux solution for WordPress. They do not provide hosting solutions to any other website platform and is a great choice of web hosting for photographers.

Its servers are specifically configured for WordPress. The method results in the ability to handle even the highest volume traffic spikes. They eliminate any worry about WordPress performance.

With Synthesis, you won’t need to worry about the technical jargon, coding, server management or anything else that is included with having a website. You are promised world-class performance when your content attracts big attention.

Because things can happen, Synthesis partnered with Sucuri, the leading WordPress security company, to provide scanning and hack services to each level of hosting. That means you can trust that your site will be safe even when you’re not around to check.

Combine the performance and security of Synthesis with the expert WordPress developers that run the business, and you really do have a top-notch management hosting solution.

It is important, however, to note that Synthesis provides website migration services for a fee. So if you’re going from Bluehost, for example, to Synthesis, and need assistance with the move it will not be free.

Web hosting for photographers on Synthesis starts at $27 a month.

Advanced Web Hosting For Photographers

In conclusion, if you are a photographer in need of expansion, then both WP Engine and Synthesis are amazing choices. They can be fantastic solutions as web hosting for photographers because they are both the best managed WordPress hosting solutions on the market.

In the end, it’s a matter of checking out their websites, features, reviews and chatting with the companies.

Good luck.