When I was a kid, and I’m sure all of you have the same story, people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up. The sad part for me is that I still haven’t grown up and there are days when I still don’t know what I want to be! That’s fine for me, but it’s not fine if you’re a professional photographer and your site reflects your confusion when a potential client comes “into the store” for a look at the merchandise.  So, here are some tips for your website galleries:

• Spend some time soul-searching and decide what you want your business to look like. You might have several different specialties you really enjoy and that’s fine – just think it through for your website.
• Once you’ve decided what you’re primary specialty is going to be, that should be the first gallery on your website. If you lead with weddings then you can anticipate getting calls on weddings. If your focus is high school seniors, then that’s your lead business. Whatever you lead with is going to wind up being your profile as time goes on.
• In terms of the graphic design elements on your site, everything should follow the same theme as your specialty. For example, I was on one site of a photographer who wants to focus on kids and sports. The potential market is huge, but the first image you saw was a landscape shot. While the image was beautiful, it had no relevance to what he wanted his core business to be.
• Limit the number of images in your galleries. You don’t need to show everybody everything you’ve ever photographed. Bambi Cantrell often uses Tiffany’s as an example. Walk by Tiffany’s and you’ll see just a couple of pieces highlighted in their windows. They don’t show you their entire inventory, but they do show you some of their most beautiful pieces. I personally believe that 10-20 images in each category are enough.
• Don’t give your visitors too much to choose from. For example, my vote is to just break weddings into two parts, “Engagements” and “Weddings”. Everyone knows how a wedding plays out, but I was on one site recently that broke it out into ten different galleries: Getting Ready, Details, The Ceremony, Leaving the Church, The Kiss…it became maddening! After each section, in order to get to the next gallery you had to go back to the home page and open the next gallery. Make it easy on your potential clients. Don’t make them mine for images.
• I’ve written this so many times before – make every image in your galleries  a “wow” print. If they don’t “wow” you they don’t belong in your gallery. Think of it this way…every image has to at least be better than what Uncle Harry can shoot. Don’t repeat images of the same subject. Show a variety of techniques. When you shop in your favorite department store they show as much variety as they can. However if you went to buy clothes and they only showed one style and in only one color you’d never bother to shop there again!

If you’re looking for a little help in the process, check out SmugMug. Last week’s post on Matthew Jordan Smith’s new site, built by SmugMugPro, got a lot of great feedback. Read the post and you’ll see what I mean.

As you mouse over each of three galleries on Matthew’s site the topic comes up. It’s neat, clean and the simplicity is stunning. His site does exactly what he needs – it presents his work and every image has the “wow” factor!

Here’s the bottom line. You can’t be in business today without a website. Your website is your storefront, studio and at times even your office. Make the experience for every client memorable and you’ll have them coming back over and over again. And last on the list, remember whatever you put up doesn’t have to be there forever. If down the road your interests start to change, your website can morph along with you!

The challenge was always his website. It just didn’t seem to match how spectacular his images were. It didn’t have the sizzle his work deserved – sort of like a can of soda that’s been open for a few hours. It’s got color, flavor and even a little fizz, but it doesn’t have the power it did when you first popped the tab.

Having worked with SmugMugPro for a long time and being nuts about everybody there, I suggested he look at doing something different with his site. I called him yesterday just to find out how it all went and got a terrific lesson in the special ingredients it took to build Matthew’s new site.

Right out of the blocks, Matthew’s new home page hits hard with the simplicity of great images!

It all started with the designer asking Matthew to look at the sites he liked the best. He looked at dozens of sites and came back with ten different websites, all having some quality and feel he really wanted to incorporate into his own site.

“I really needed something simple. It’s got to have a fast load, be quick to navigate and without question EASY. Here’s the issue, no ad agency, art director or editor wants to spend a lot of time looking for the kind of images they need. They’re not interested in gimmicks and any of the bells and whistles a lot of photographers add to their site. If they’re on my site, it’s for one thing only, photography, and that’s what I need to present.”

So many photographers build their sites thinking about how they want to show their work, not what their target audience might want to see. It got me thinking about Matthew’s target audience…they’re “look, book and go!”

Next in the process were daily updates and constant feedback. While SmugMug built what Matthew needed super fast, it didn’t change the importance of keeping him in the loop through the entire process. Client involvement is critical when you’re working on any project like this.

Even Matthew’s contact page holds true to his theme of great photography, simplicity and easy communication.

There are two last ingredients in my mind making the relationship between SmugMug and Matthew a success. First, Matthew put in a lot of his own time. So often I hear stories about photographers who told the developer what they wanted and then walked away until the project was done. Matthew recognized the importance of allocating whatever time SmugMug needed from him to make sure everything was exactly the way he wanted it.

The second key ingredient is one of the things I love about the projects I’ve worked on with SmugMug myself, good old fashioned business ethics. As hokey as it might sound, this is a family environment and everybody talks to each other. There were very few email communications through the process with Matthew, but there were regular phone calls. There was a lot of good personal communication and that was a key. They never got caught in the trap of send an email, wait for the response, send another email, etc. They never got trapped in the endless business volley of emails which most of the time is anything but efficient.

Like every post I write, there’s a lesson here.  In fact, more than just one and they apply to all of us in this industry today. Matthew loves his new site and blog because 1) He was involved in every step of the project 2) SmugMug listened to what he wanted and kept him in the loop 3) After years of listening to his clients, Matthew was able to build a site that meets their needs and last on the list, the project was done on time, even ahead of schedule. SmugMug exceeded his expectations.

If Matthew isn’t already on your radar check out his blog. Here’s the link to some of the best how-to and motivational posts in professional photography. In fact, Matthew’s slogan says it all:

“Always dream big!”

]]> http://skipsphotonetwork.com/2012/04/matthew-jordan-smiths-new-site-and-blog-all-thanks-to-smug-mug/feed/ 1 http://skipsphotonetwork.com/2012/04/doing-website-reviews/ http://skipsphotonetwork.com/2012/04/doing-website-reviews/#comments Mon, 09 Apr 2012 11:51:26 +0000 http://skipsphotonetwork.com/?p=9018 This year, as part of the Skip’s Summer School program, I want to do something no other workshops have done. Thinking about what’s the most critical marketing component of every photographer’s business, I decided it was time to do a website review.  This year every attendee gets a website review as part of their registration. I’ve done a dozen or so of them so far and they’ve been running from thirty to ninety minutes.

Let’s set the stage with what your website really is. It’s your storefront – your most important way for you to reach your target audience.  Everybody has the same challenge – we’re all too close to our own work.  Over and over again I’m finding photographers with outstanding skills whose work is just buried in too many clicks, too many images and often too many words!

For many, it’s work in progress, which is fine, but your potential client, who wanders into your site, can only judge you on who you are at that very moment. They don’t know you’ve got better images in other files. They don’t know about your passion for photography and documenting the human spirit. They don’t know your sense of humor and the wonderful way you might work with clients.

All they see is what’s in front of them and too often it just ain’t pretty! They’re trying to navigate through websites that were built section by section with no planning. They’re wading through thousands of images – one site I was on recently had over 4,000 images in the galleries.

Here are a few other challenges I’ve seen:

• Pages and pages of testimonials won’t impress anybody. Personally, I believe most photographers would be better off offering potential clients a list of past clients as a reference and showing actual work from past sittings, weddings etc. There’s no such thing as a bad testimonial and when you have dozens of them on your site they just lose the impact.
• Your galleries need to show what you’re all about. If your core business is weddings, then start out showing weddings, not outdoor wildlife or table top work for example.
• Make it easy for people to navigate through your site. A few sites I’ve reviewed have been buried in drop down windows and tricky little twists and turns that will simply frustrate your visitor. If they’ve walked into the “store”, make it easy for them to find things.
• Don’t show work that isn’t your very best. If “Uncle Harry” can get a better shot than what you’re showing then it doesn’t belong on your site!

This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what I’ve seen, but it’s important to say it one more time. I’ve spoken with so many photographers who really have some beautiful work, but life got in the way and their website went up just to make sure they had something out there. Now it’s time to do some fine-tuning and make their website a fitting representation of who they are and their passion for creativity and their clients.

If you’ve registered for Summer School and not been contacted yet, don’t worry, you’ll be getting an email in the next week or two.  One other side benefit for these reviews has been getting to know each attendee. By the time we all get to Summer School I will have spoken with every photographer who’s attending!

Summer School is August 5-8 just outside Chicago and only ten miles from Ohare. It’s an easy location to get to and with this year’s faculty and sponsors it’s going to be a pretty remarkable program.

See you in Chicago!

Here’s the challenge with your website…

If any of you were building your own dream studio you’d pay attention to every single detail. You’d spend hours deciding on window placement, ceiling height, wall textures and flooring. You’d pay attention to every dimension, right down to where the light switches would be. Yet, when it comes to building your website, which is your storefront today, you’ve loaded it with mediocre images, rarely proofed your text on the site and in most cases you’ve made it a nightmare for consumers to even find their way through the maze.  You loaded everything in because you knew you needed a website, but you spent so little time thinking through how it would really look.

That’s one of the reasons I enjoy working with SmugMugPro so much. This is their business – and their entire platform is based on a goal to make you look good. Plus, they’re so photo-centric – a company for photographers built by photographers.

I’ve talked with a half dozen attendees so far. Each one has some terrific work and there’s no question they have the passion, but like all of us, they’ve gotten caught up in the day to day challenges and don’t realize they’ve missed some of the key opportunities and buzz-words.  Here are some of the things I’m finding:

• There seems to be a lot of unfinished ideas out there. It’s almost as if you started writing a letter and sent it before you finished some of the paragraphs. That would be fine, but you sent the letter! You opened your website before it was finished.
• Often the design of a site has been dictated by the web designer and NOT the photographer. This leads to a variance of priorities that too often the potential client isn’t going to care about. For example, they want to see images and don’t care if a wedding is broken out into “detail”, “ceremony”, “reception” etc.  They just want to see the story. Don’t add extra clicks to the process.
• Everybody’s “About” section to date needs work and here’s the problem. We’re all too close to our own businesses and we’re uncomfortable talking about ourselves. Your About Section needs to show your passion for being a photographer. Remember, clients don’t hire you because of what you provide, but why you love what you do. This is about building trust.
• Last on the list for this morning’s post is about the images in your galleries. Look at each one and ask the question, “If this was the only image I could show, would I hire me?” Don’t compromise on the quality of your images – make every image a “wow” print!

This year’s Summer School is called Hands-on Intensive for a reason! We’ve got a goal to give more photographers the tools they need to build a stronger presence and it starts when you register!  See you at Summer School!

1. Make people mine for data on your website.  This is so easy to avoid, but evidently a lot of photographers think their client base is still playing Dungeons and Dragons. They bury their most important information under a sea of testimonials, accolades and miscellaneous pages. People eventually just get tired of searching and eventually go elsewhere.
2. Don’t give people a phone number to contact you. It’s the let’s-make-people-contact-me-my-way scheme. Seriously, don’t you feel great when you contact a company and can actually talk to a live body? Your website and your business is no different. And the same goes for business cards that send people to your website instead of your phone. If they’re serious they want to talk to you, not write an email. I understand if you’re working out of your home and don’t want to give people an address, but give them a phone number! There’s no such thing as giving your audience too much contact information.
3. Put up images that look just like Uncle Harry’s! Here’s one that’s so easy to fix, but there are some photographers who think Uncle Harry is the competition.  Up go images in the galleries that are as good as Uncle Harry’s!  WRONG – they need to be better than Uncle Harry’s and really demonstrate why you’re a professional photographer! Look at your website as if you were the client. Based on the quality of your images, would you hire you?
4. Not returning phone calls and emails makes you look really busy and in high demand!  Who started this one? Seriously, there are people on this planet who think that building your business is all about looking busier than you really are and one ingredient is to play hard-to-get!  That might have worked to get a date in high school, but success in business today is about a fast response.  It’s about great customer service and it all starts with your client’s perception you really care about their business. A quick response shows you care and they’re important.
5. Confuse your audience! This one is all about showing every image you’ve ever captured. Hey, who knows, that potential bride might just have an auto parts business on the side and be really interested in your table-top product work, especially the series you did on spark plugs, tools and 10W40! Keep your specialties separate and don’t give people too much to look at that isn’t relevant. For example, wedding and family portraiture go well together, but throw in your images of the Grand Canyon and you’ll lose them every time.

I cannot tell a lie, sarcasm is definitely one of my strong suits and tomorrow I’ve got five more ways you can help your competitors! And, let’s not forget the bright side of this – giving up business means you’ll have more time to just sit back and relax. After all, you had enough business already anyway, right?

Business is tough enough in a great economy let alone the challenges everyone faces today. Putting all the sarcasm aside, it just takes time, patience and lots of work. There are no shortcuts! Work is labor-intensive – that’s why it’s called work! But knowing there’s a quote for everything, I went searching…

“If hard work is the key to success, most people would rather pick the lock.”  

Happy Wednesday! See you tomorrow for five more mistakes you want to avoid!

I just spent five days out of the office in Sarasota. The blog was all caught up with two posts in the pipeline when we left on Thursday. The minus side of being in a routine is simply how hard it is to break, when you really want to. Five days on vacation and the latest I could sleep was 6:25 a.m. I still couldn’t do anything without first checking email on my phone. and often I’d find myself at my laptop, even though there was no wifi! 

So, I’m curious about your routines! I’m also curious how many of you have built into your routine the importance of checking your website EVERY day! I spoke at the IPI convention a couple of years ago and loved it when an attendee told me that there were five people in his business and each morning everyone has a different page assigned to them to make sure it’s loading the way it should.

From that point on I set things up so one of the first things I do, right after checking email, is to check the site, in this case Summer School.Then it’s on to email followed by the blog, then Facebook and Twitter. It’s just part of the routine. And while I have yet to find something major not working the way it should,  I have been able to do a lot of fine-tuning.

So, here’s the biggest question of the day – do you check your website every morning?

• Check your site on Explorer, Firefox and anything else out there that your client base might be using.
• If you have a storefront, check to make sure the appropriate links to Paypal, Authorize.net, etc. are working properly.
• Check a couple of pages at random to see if they load fast enough.
• Check any links you have to other sites: Twice I’ve found links not working and it turned out it was a mistake I’d made and never caught it initially.
• Last on the list – pick something to proof-read. Trust me – you’ll ALWAYS find a mistake!

Your website is no different than any retail store or office. Not checking it every day is no different than Nordstrom’s forgetting to unlock the door and then wondering what happened to business! Most important of all, and just like Nordstrom’s, keep your “inventory” fresh! Your galleries have to show your very best work and your promotions need to always be current!

Living in LA you never say, “I’ve seen it all,” because sure enough an hour later you’ll see something more bizarre.  It’s great to look young, but so often in LA you see women (and men too) who have just pushed the envelope on youth too far.    Personally, I don’t want my gray hair died back to what I looked like in High School!  And I earned those bags I get under my eyes, why would I want to give them up?  The list could go on and on, but here’s my point.

Take a look at your website.   It might be perfect or, like so many other photographers, you either need a facelift or you’ve overdosed on photographic Botox!   

First, photographers often get tired of their images before they really need to be changed.  At the other extreme, many of you can focus your camera, but can’t focus on your specialty.   You’ll have all kinds of images on your website – some of them might be great, others are mediocre, even bad and were just included to fill up space. 

Think about this for just a second.  Pretend you’re a potential client and you’re looking through your galleries.  Let’s assume you’re guilty of inconsistent quality, with a few great images in the beginning, tapering off to average and poor later on.  Look at your images through the eyes of your client.  For me the first question I’d worry about, is who am I going to get if I hire this photographer?  While one image might be spectacular, a minute later I saw images that were “underwhelming”.  The gap between great images and everything else might be huge, leaving me wonder which persona will I get for my shoot.

Second,  there’s the Stuckey’s Grand Buffet Theme of just too many images and too much variety.  I’ve talked a lot about diversity, but you need to make sure your images are separated by subject matter and don’t throw too much at potential clients. 

My good buddy, Scott Bourne, and I have two different thoughts on this.  I don’t have a problem with a photographer demonstrating two different specialties, for example, wedding and children, because they’re both linked in a natural progression theme of family.  Just keep them in different galleries.  Scott believes you’re be better served to position them in two different websites and also target your marketing separately as well.   Pick either suggestion, but don’t mix them up in the same galleries.  You’ll wind up confusing your clients and in the end they might go elsewhere, just because they’re looking for a photographer who’s focused on just their needs.

Third, are your images in sync with today’s styles and trends?  So often I’ve seen images on websites I know were taken years ago.  You need to keep your website fresh!  Personally, I love it when photographers use their images in a blog style with a little copy that describes when and where the images were taken and especially demonstrates their enthusiasm.

Last but not least, limit your copy!  If a picture is worth a thousand words, then don’t bury people in paragraph after paragraph about yourself – give them images demonstrating quality and consistency.  It’s outdated terminology, but your goal is to create “sticky pages”.  Sticky pages means they literally don’t want to leave your site.  They want to share your images with their friends and they especially come back to look at more of your images at other times.

In the end we’re right back to getting a face lift!    Your website is your calling card – it’s who your future client sees before they ever pick up the phone or meet you.   Show images that are created from the heart and you’ll be able to pull at people’s heart strings!

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.  Ansel Adams

While the statement itself sounds like a complete contradiction, think about how hard it is to write something precise.   We all use too many words to just get to the point.   If it takes more than a paragraph or two to explain something then it’s probably too long.

Now, here’s a great exercise for a Sunday morning and it comes in two parts.  First, if you could come up with just six words to describe your love for photography what would they be?  Second, look at the “About Us” section of your website.  Does the description of who you are on your site match up with those six words that describe your love for photography?  And, are you able to do it in two paragraphs or less?

Happy Sunday everybody – make it a great day – enjoy your family and friends and relax!  All the challenges of the business will be there tomorrow morning!

Quality is still number one!  It’s the one common denominator on every site of every photographer or even company we consider iconic.  I know it’s not a revolutionary concept, but we’ve all gotten so caught up in social media, blogging and the buzz in our industry that too many of us seem to forget, a well-exposed, composed and presented image is still King!

All the marketing genius in the world isn’t going to substitute the quality of your photographs.  And while lots of hype and discounting might seem to get more business in the door initially, it won’t get you a second time buyer.  People won’t come back to you if your work and service was “underwhelming”.

So, the next time you put images up on your website, think quality.  Think about if what you’re about to post is really your very best work.  Is it representative of a philosophy that suggests you never compromise the final image?  Does it really show the skill set you want to present?

I found two quotes that seem appropriate to the topic:

“Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives. ” William A Foster

“When you’re out of quality you’re out of business.” Anonymous