This MISTAKE Can Ruin Your Photography Website

hey everybody i'm kevin patrick-robbins everybody calls me kpr and this is studio builder [Applause] what i'm going to be doing in this video is i'm going to be taking a look at another photographer's website a commercial photographer's website and breaking down what they can do to improve their website i've been developing websites since 1994 which is what accounts for all this gray so i'm going to take a look at the website i'm going to talk about what can be done to improve it what's being done well and then make some suggestions on how to make this photographer's website even better the website we'll be looking at today is from commercial photographer chris folk who's based in winston-salem north carolina so let's get into it so the first thing i can see is that chris is using format for her website format is a website hosting company that specializes in websites for photographers it's also one of the few platforms that i recommend for commercial photographers unfortunately chris is using a template called horizon left it is a side scrolling template it looks great but it doesn't function very well and that's not her fault you need to avoid side scrolling websites for two reasons first of all they're not natural to navigate they're not consistent with existing user experience design users shouldn't be figuring out how to navigate your website when they arrive at your website which brings us to point number two side scrolling websites are not easy to navigate you can scroll through a side scrolling website with a mouse you can't scroll with the up or down arrows with the page buttons or the home or end buttons and this slows down the discovery process of your images not being able to scroll properly goes against expected norms when we visit a website when we think of websites we think of up and down scrolling we don't think of left to right scrolling now on mobile devices the side scroll isn't an issue because this website is responsive and scrolling functions exactly as you would expect now that might be fine for consumer photography website but for commercial photographers where your clients tend to be art producers art buyers photo editors or corporate communications people they're working at their desks usually on desktop computers and large monitors but a website should be responsive and should function as expected no matter what device people are using to experience your website so let's look at the navigation here chris has three portfolios beauty fashion and portraits on her info page she indicates that she is available for assignments she also has a section that says commercial portraits and headshots so what i would like to see is i would like to see two additional portfolios i would like to see a portfolio specifically for headshots and then i would like to see another portfolio that specifically says work or commissions and then you would use that as your home page i could also see a possible third additional portfolio called overview and an overview portfolio is usually a thumbnail portfolio that gives the visitor a quick overview of your portfolio so you would have some fashion some portrait some beauty some headshots and combine that into your overview portfolio and that would usually consist of about 20 to 30 images next up we have this page here called info rename info to about the words about and contact should be on every single website when i go to a website and i want to know how to find you the first thing i'm looking for is the word contact or about make the wording clear have a contact page even if it's just your phone number and your email address have a contact page on your website on your about page add a client list to your about page have a nice bullet point list of who all your clients have been especially if they are brand names or publications this provides social proof and adds third party validation to your website so when people go to your about page and they see a long list of clients they will know that you have experience and a lot of people have hired you to do this work the final thing i noticed about chris's website are her image file names so let's take a quick look under the hood at the source code for the website and look at the file names of the images here chris is making a fundamental mistake that i see so many photographers make which is to not rename their images when they upload them they just take the file name from the camera and add dash edit to the file name or they will give the file name something that's relevant to the project but isn't relevant to the image or the page on which it's appearing on your website now not all of chris's images are named this way some are a little bit better but it does show that she has not implemented a naming convention for her images that she sticks to or that is optimized for search engine results what you have to realize is that google is looking at all of the images on your website and trying to make sense of them i did a whole episode on the studio builder podcast about how to improve your image seo which i'll link to in the show notes below but basically you want every image on every page to have a file name using the keywords the keyword phrases that are relevant to the page on which that image is residing when you're naming your images you need to know what page that image is going to be shown on and then rename the image before you upload it to match the keyword phrase for that page and then all the other images in that gallery on that page should be variations of that keyword phrase instead of fashion photography fashion photographer fashion photographers photography fashion you can also append or prepend other information to those keywords such as your name and your location and adding your location to image file names will help for local search rankings so if you're shooting headshots your clients are typically not going to be on the other side of the country they're mostly going to be local to you so what i would recommend here for chris is to create that headshots gallery and to have every image have the keywords headshots in winston-salem north carolina and charlotte north carolina and possibly even raleigh north carolina and that's just going to help improve her search rankings for her headshots so just to recap here are my recommendations for chris's website first of all i want to see the word info changed to about or contact next i highly recommend using a different template use a template that has a large hero image that has easy to navigate galleries with thumbnails thumbnails that can open up to big larger images that i can click through just by hitting the arrow key on my keyboard add a headshots portfolio add a portfolio titled work or commissions possibly add an overview portfolio and then finally rename all the images so that they include keyword phrases for the page on which those images reside and that's it otherwise chris's work is fantastic she just needs to tweak a few things with the website that will really help improve the user experience and the search ability if you found this video helpful please give it a thumbs up that helps other people find this video as well and i want to help as many people as possible also if you have a website and you would like me to review it and give you my thoughts on it there's a link in the description below that you can click on to fill out a form and i'll take a look at your website and i'll start choosing websites to feature in upcoming videos i hope this was valuable thanks a lot take care