I’m Dave Williams and I’m here for #TravelTuesday to talk a little about websites and why it’s important to get it right.
Our website and our social media presence are our shop window as photographers. Much more often than not we are found on social media and anyone we have captivated through there will explore us through our website. With this in mind, it’s crucial we engage our target audience on our website and have everything laid out just right to show off who we are and what we’re capable of doing, and providing the pathway to be contacted.
Step one is absolutely nailing our landing page. There isn’t one single correct way to do this, but there are certainly ways to not do it. What’s definitely one of the right things to do is to have an easily accessible menu with clear options. For example, a button to lead to our portfolio, a button to lead to our experience, and a button to lead to our contact page should be clear and easy to find. These are, after all, the most important things to somebody considering booking us.
So, our portfolio. This should have enough images, but not too many images. Vague, I know, but you’ll know when it’s right! If we have just a few images people may not be satisfied and will get to the last image too soon, but on the other hand if there are too many images we lose the sense of leaving people wanting more. It’s as if we need a clear, definable set of images to reflect our clear, definable style. On that note, it’s very important that our portfolio is a true reflection of our style of photography. I mean that in two senses: firstly, we need to have a clear style laid out so that somebody booking us knows the style of image we will create for them. Secondly, we need to be able to recreate that style time after time, and that means not adding images in a style we can’t reproduce. Our portfolio is an advert, and it’s a reflection of our creative skill and ability. It deserves a lot of our time and attention to create it and get it just right. Here’s a top tip – if an image you’re considering putting in is ‘good enough,’ it probably isn’t good enough! Only the best go in our portfolio.
Our ‘About Us’ or our experience page needs to be a place where we show off. Don’t hold back here! People browsing our website are looking to see what we can do and what we’ve done in the past. This is our ‘no holds barred’ space to sing our praises, plug our awesome reviews, show behind the scenes images, and get that prospective client to move on to the contact page!
Contact is the first step to securing the booking, so making ourself contactable is important. Personally I like to give options. Flip things on their head and turn yourself into a consumer – imagine you’re on the Amazon contact page. What do you want to see? You want options, right? Depending on the problem or my mood I’d want to choose between email, phone or whatever else. If we incorporate this thinking into our own website we afford people options and therefore we don’t close down channels of communication. A contact form is a standard feature on many website design platforms, but also include an email address and a phone number, or even point out that your phone number is available for WhatsApp or you have a Facebook page with Messenger. The more options people have to contact us, the more chance we have of satisfying our client with a communication medium they’re happy with.
This week, or even this month, take the time to critique your website and make it work for you to reach and attract more clients. It can also be a good idea to ask others in the community to critique it for you. Just don’t ask your family – they’ll always say it’s amazing!
Much love
Dave
