Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Is Your Studio Website Helping or Hurting Your Business?


We all know that one of our key marketing components in the computer age is a website. It has become our portfolio that can be viewed from anywhere with internet access (this includes your phone!)

Navigation should be simple and information easy to access. Clients don't want to play hide-and-seek looking for your contact info; email address and phone number should be readily visible. (Pet peeve: websites with "contact us" forms that do not show an email address. If it's so secret that you can't share it with me, what makes me want to do business with you?)

Anyway, I was reviewing a website last week for a newer photographer who had applied for Certification. This was a follow-up call in which we were discussing why she didn't pass. I asked her why she didn't have the images she submitted on her website, as the ones on her site were weak at best and showed minimal evidence of her knowledge of the craft and use of lighting techniques. The ones she sent for judging were far better! Her reply? "I like to keep my old images on my website as well as my new ones so I can see how far I've come."

While it's always nice to have a visual reminder of "Before and After", your clients don't care about how bad you were at the beginning. All they want to know is that when they invest money in portraiture from you; the resulting images will ROCK. Keep your reminders on your personal computer.

Take the time to clean the old stuff off your website often and replace it with fresh images; we're all guilty of letting it slide. Think of it this way - how much business are you losing because even a few of your images are less-than-stunning? If this is the case, then less is more. Show a few great images instead of lots of average ones.

- David

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