Creating a photography website can be very intimidated to the photography business owner.  Typically as photographers, we have a great eye for design, patterns and color so our first inclination is to make a website that appeals to our visual nature.  However, little attention is paid to the actual purpose of the website which eventually leads to a beautiful but ineffective website.

The purpose of this article is to help the home based or studio based photography business owner to establish an effective website.  First of what is the definition of an effective website for your business?

In short, an effective website for a photography business is one that:

1. Brings in new clients
2. Helps retain current clients
3. Screens out bad clients

If you already have a website and it is not doing each of those three things, then it is time for a major overhaul.  All of these three objectives are easily achievable.  In fact new technology on the internet makes it easier than ever to reach new clients and stay in touch with your current clients.

There are also a few other considerations to keep in mind when building your website.  These will make your life a whole lot easier and save you a lot of money.  These consideration are:

Easy to update

If it is difficult to update your website, then you will never do it. Anything that takes too much time is the first thing to go when things get busy and you can’t afford to have a website that is more pain than profit.   But when you have a site that is easy to update, it will always have fresh new content for your current clients to look at.  This will help them return to you again and again.

Inexpensive

Most small business owners don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on a website. Nor do they have hundreds of dollars to spend each month on maintaining it.  The good news is that it is possible to build a highly effective website for very little money up front.  I have never built a site that cost more than $200.  In many cases, there was no upfront cost at all except for the hosting fee.  And by choosing the right webhost your monthly cost for webhosting will be less than the price of a single movie ticket.

Professional Appearance

Putting out a bad first impression is worse than no impression at all. So your website needs to present an appearance that impresses your potential clients. Now above I mentioned that photographers often make the mistake of spending all their time on the website design and none on the marketing effectiveness.  So why here do I say that the design is important?  Well  you are in the photography business which is a highly visual enterprise.  So you don’t want to come across as amateur by having a poorly designed and ugly website.  Luckily it is easy to have a great looking site without losing any of the marketing effectiveness.

Engages the visitor

When you visit a website how long is your average stay?  It is probably less than 10 seconds.  This is about average.  So you can see how important it is to grab your visitors attention and provide them what they want quickly and easily.  If your website visitor has to endure endless animations, slow-loading images, or a splash page you are essentially driving them away.

Tracks Results

The single most important item in successful businesses is the ability to track what works.  By knowing how and why people are visiting your site, you will be able to capitalize on trends and increase visitors. All of which means more clients for you! This is actually very easy using a free tool put  by Google called Google Analytics. By inserting a small piece of code on your site you are able to see how visitors arrived at your site, what areas they visited and where the left.  This is invaluable in targeting your marketing campaign.

So there are a few considerations and rules to live by in setting up your photography business website.  I wish you the best success in your business endeavors!

Are you a professional photographer looking for help on marketing online?  If you are, then a complete step by step photography website how to manual can be a welcome alternative to spending hundreds of hours learning how to build a website on your own.

There are many things to consider when setting up your business website.  Key factors include the choice of domain name, webhost, type of website, and design considerations.   I have been building websites for a long time and the internet has undergone some drastic changes in the past few years.  Not long ago it required thousands of dollars to hire a webmaster or hundreds of hours of dedicated study time to learn how to do a website yourself in order to get an effective website.  However, that is no longer the case.

With the advent of Content Management Systems, and in particular WordPress, it has become much easier for non-webmasters to build their own websites.  Unfortunately this ease of use can also lead to a false sense of capability.  This is because despite the apparent simplicity, there are many techniques and secrets that will greatly increase the effectiveness of your website.

After viewing many photographer websites I came to the realization that some education would be very helpful in creating more effective websites that would be ranked well in the search engines.  As a result I constructed the Photography Internet Marketing How-to manual which would provide the education I gleaned over thousands of hours online.

Some of the items that are covered include the following:

-Keywords:  What are keywords and why selecting the proper keywords is one of the most important actions you can take.

-Domain Names: What are the best domain names for your business?  How long is too long? Are extensions other than .com okay to use?  Where should you register your domains?

-Webhosting: Which webhost to use?  What features are important?  How much should you pay?

-Site construction: What type of website is best? (Flash, HTML, WordPress etc.)

-Design:  How to have a professionally designed website without hiring a professional designer.

-Traffic: What Plugins should you include to get your website ranked higher in the search engines.

These are just some of the subjects that are covered in the how-to manual.  It is not necessary to be fluent in HTML or PHP or any other programming language in order to create your own website.  In fact, it is often better to build the website yourself for a number of reasons to include the fact that no one knows your business better than you.  Not to mention the fact that you will save a lot of money.  However, this would not be possible without a complete guide that would show you exactly what you need to do in a step-by-step fashion to establish your website online.  Once established, this website will bring new clients to your business every day with no additional cost or time commitment to you.  That is the magic of the internet!s.

Photography Website Creation Checklist

Congratulations for recognizing the importance of the internet in your marketing plan. As you requested, below is your Step-By-Step Checklist for building an effective, low cost, and efficient website for your business.

This checklist came about through years and years of building websites online. I firmly believe that the best option for marketing today is to use a WordPress foundation for your site. Consequently, this checklist uses WordPress. It offers a clean interface, highly advanced SEO features, and is free. It is hard to beat that!

If you are new to the internet or struggle with the technical aspects, then I encourage you to join my Photography Internet Marketing Schoolhouse for access to complete tutorials and a complete and detailed manual for each of the steps below.

• Before building your site, it is important to first define its purpose. Do you want your website to bring in new clients? Are you going to provide online proofing? Do you want to collect email addresses for a mailing list?Be descriptive on what you are trying to accomplish.
• Next build list of keywords based on your services and location (i.e. “Tucson Wedding Photographer”). Think about what phrases potential clients would use to search on the internet for your services. Be sure to write these keywords down. You will need them when choosing domains and providing content for your site.
• Now register one or more domain names for your business (I recommend Godaddy.com). Register your business name for main site at a minimum. So if your photography business is “Wilson Photography”, try to register “WilsonPhotography.com”. Also I recommend registering additional domains from the keywords in step 2 if they available. These extra domains can be used to enhance search engine rankings through mini-sites.
• You will now need to sign up for a webhost. I recommend using Bluehost.com or Hostgator.com. Both of these have the key factors I look for in a website which include unlimited add-on domains and Simple Scripts or Fantastico installations.
• Now you need to tell your domain registrar where you are going to host your site. You do this by setting the nameservers for your domain on Godaddy or whoever you used to register the domain to the nameservers provided to you by your webhost. If you use the same company for both your domain and webhost then this is usually done automatically.
• Now you need to tell your webhost about the new domain. You do this by adding the domain to your webhost account through the webhost control panel. Again if you registered the domain through your webhost then this is automatic.
• Now write down the categories you will use on your site based on the type of services you offer. (i.e. Babies, Weddings, Seniors, etc.) These categories will be used to organize your blog postings and are important for search engine optimization.
• Now get a blank sheet of paper and define the structure of your site. This can be a simple wire diagram. Include the pages you will include such as the Home page, information pages, galleries, etc.
• Finally it is time to install WordPress on your webhost. If your webhost supports Simple Scripts or Fantastico this is extremely easy!
• Once WordPress is installed, you have a generic basic theme included. But you want something snazzy. So look for a WordPress theme that fits your style. Many are free, but the best of course cost a bit of money. However, they are still much cheaper than hiring your own designer! Here are some of my favorite sources of WordPress themes:
  
  Prophoto2 Blog – Designed specifically for photographers. Very professional appearance. Designed primarily for “blog” sites, but pages can be added for full website.
  
  Studiopress – One of the original premium theme providers. I use the “Streamline” theme throughout this manual.

  Ithemes – Contains a large variety of full-featured themes suitable for business purposes.

  One-theme – I love the features included with this theme! More of a upbeat style.

  Woo Themes – I like the look of these themes, though I personally have not used them.

  WP-Remix – This theme offers a lot of customization and layout options. Not the prettiest out of the box, but I love the ability to change layout easily for pages.Login to WordPress and in the “Settings” area modify the Title, Tagline, Email, Timezone and date as desired.

• Once you have chosen your theme, upload it to WordPress and activate it in the “Appearance” section. It will now be your default theme.
• Login to your WordPress dashboard and edit the following settings:- Under “Users” click the “admin” profile and enter your name, email, website URL as desired. Change the password if needed to something you can remember.- Get an API key from WordPress.com and activate Akismet plugin- Set permalinks in WordPress Dashboard in the “Settings” area to: /%year%/%monthnum%/%category%/%postname%- Delete default blogroll items in “Links” area.- Add categories you wrote down earlier to “Categories” list.- Change logo as desired based on your selected theme

  - Customize widgets as desired

  - Add email subscription widget using Feedburner

  - Set Update Services under “Settings->Writing” link.

• With that done, it is time to start having fun with some very cool plugins. These will add some great functionality to your theme and come highly recommended: Headspace - Important for SEO. Allows you to set post and page meta tags such as titles and descriptions easily. Also includes functionality for Google Analytics.NexGen Gallery – A great gallery for showing off all your cool photos.EZ Backup - No one likes worrying about doing backups. This plugin does it automatically once setup.Fast and Secure Contact Form – Create a contact form so your website visitors can reach you (and schedule sessions).

  Google XML Sitemaps- Creates a Google compliant XML sitemap. Don’t worry what that means. Just do it. It is important!

• Alright those are the basics. You can now go ahead and start creating all those pages that you defined in the site structure. WordPress is easy to use so don’t be afraid! Keep in consideration your keywords for SEO purposes.
• With your site all populated with good content, start spreading the word. The most important factor in Google ranking is the number of inbound links. So start spreading your website URL around the web!

Well, that is my quick Website Creation Checklist. This is the procedure I use when building my websites and is a good flow to follow. If you have any comments or suggestions, be sure to leave them in the comment form below!