Lessons

Lesson Info

Case Study - Looking at Photography Websites

Welcome to this case study and I hope you've enjoyed this section so far on websites now. It's time to actually dive in and look at some examples, which I think everyone's probably waiting for. So we're going to look at a few business websites. Photo websites of yours and people, you know, starting with will see photography. So I've seen this. You're looking at this now and it looks like you basically put into practice everything that you talked about in the lessons, Right? So it's very simple actually. If you're looking at the first six up here that you're seeing five out of the six were all shot on that very first free day. Um, and a couple of them are my friends. And so I'm really just starting to collect these are all done in the first two days of, of starting this business. Um, I used my favorite ones up top and these are examples of photos that I can take four people which in my mind or what people are looking for. Um, trying to do a lot of diversity here. There's color, there's ...

black and white. There's red hair, there's dark hair, there's male, there is female. Uh, you know, I'm trying to find some more different skin tones, different backgrounds for colors. Just making it available and different for, for people to sort of look at while at the same time, keeping this very simple. I only have a contact page and about me about me is not done yet, but you can click on it. You can see this is still a very like work in progress. This is a self portrait I took on the first day just for fun. I'm using zen folio for this. So this is a zen folio built page without a domain name. So right now, this is just we'll see photo slash zen folio, blah blah blah blah. So it's kind of dirty right now. Eventually I'm going to buy a domain name. I just haven't gotten around to it because I'm advertising through instagram. I don't need to send people to my website yet unless their clients and I've created through zen folio a client access page. And you can see right now you can't see the photos. But if you were say you were, you know David Tripler, you would click on that and you'll be asked for his password only. He knows the password so he can get to his photos off the top of my head. So now we're able to see these are the ones I've edited for him. You can select them. You can download them. If you go back, you can see his proofs that are unedited and you can see there's a lot here. And if you were, if you were David right now you could basically, if you hover the mouse over one of them, you can select heart and create a favorite playlist basically and send them to me so he can just run through all his proofs right now and these are all unedited raw with this camera and this setup. And so this is how I've structured my website, it's a it's a website that bleeds in the client access because that's what I need for, you know, myself. Yeah, I mean it's nice that it's all there and I think like people really would appreciate having that client access seeing their photos right on the way. And I think my clientele with whom I'm dealing with, a lot of professionals and they're used to this sort of situation, weddings are a little different. Events are a little different. You could probably get away with the dropbox and send them all your photos, but I have to interact with these guys as far as them picking their photos and then uploading and having access to them all. Yeah, so your contact page? Yeah, I just wanted them to be able to send me an email and get in touch with me. There's a couple of things that they would go, but I don't want them to have to copy and paste um a an email dress that's somewhere floating on my site. The one thing I don't have on my site yet, which is a big no, no social media links. Yeah, again, I only have instagram and I'm just building this, getting there, but it'll be there eventually. Yeah, it's cool because, you know, we're kind of building this business, you've done in the past with other businesses. That's why you have the experience. But as you're building this new business, we kind of get to see it through this course unfold. So let's go ahead and look at someone else or one of the other. Let's look at Elizabeth Cruz, you mentioned this earlier, another case study. So, so Elizabeth Cruz is again my high end wedding photography that I have with another artist. She is a, you know, she's like, look at this first shot with the girl, she's like high end model photography. These photos are me actually, yeah, but they're edited in a little bit of a higher class sort of, I definitely could tell because I've seen before. Yeah, different tones color. And you can see that we're sort of presenting them in a sort of a different manner. This is like a slide show, elegant fine art way of presenting things. And um you know, when you're going to try and charge someone $8,000, I think you need to have a little bit of a higher class. Look, and you can see these edits are like way different than these might actually be the same. Um These are some of the best photos taken from a wedding. Wasn't that what the, that's what the medium formats G F X. So you can see that this is like a different way to present like a wedding versus a more classic way, which we'll look at next. Um And again, I don't have, we don't have a we decided, we don't have a lot on this homepage. You look at your photos when you're interested. You can go up to the top right and click info. And so this will lead you to what we're about. There's a sentence about the two of us. There's a photo of the two of us. So you can see us and then immediately there's a way to contact us. We don't have social media for this because we're not pushing pushing this company. But it's great because it's there if someone asked, she actually pulling in the clientele because of her network, because she's a fashion photographer. She gets a lot more of those clients than I do. But she never had any wedding actual wedding experience. So I'm sort of the backbone to the business aspect of it. And she's pulling in the clients and clearly she's amazing photographer. Yeah, well, I would say that with this website and with the head shot website, like the goal is to like have that customer flow and flow, be able to arrive at your website, see if it's for them or not. Were, you know, in marketing, we call this the Aida funnel a idea and that's awareness. So they become aware of you and that's whether it's through word of mouth. They see you're on social media. So they're aware of, we'll see photography or we'll see photo and then I XYZ interest. So they go to your website, they see your photos, they're interested in it because that's what they want and your headshots, they definitely have a style. You got those different colored backgrounds. Some people are going to be into it. Some people aren't, if they're into it, they have that interest and then that desire build that they want, you know, they actually want your, your, your work, they want to hire you. And the last part of the marketing funnel is a for action. So they take action and they hire you or they take action and it's easy to contact you and that's on both of these websites. It's super easy to work someone through that marketing funnel. Now, that's a little bit, you know, the loss of philosophical or yeah, it's not something that you are probably thinking about as a business right now as a new photographer, but that's how, as a business you should be actually thinking about how you're actually getting clients. So let's go back to this last website. So, this third website is a friend that I have out in Palm Springs and that's in California and that's a huge wedding destination. So there's a decent amount of wedding photographers out there and she's taken a more of a classical look about her websites on the front of it. You know, her. So on the front of it is pictures of her, a lot of her photos that are being pulled in from her instagram, like I just noticed like she just posted these on her instagram and so that little strip at the bottom is pulling, I don't know what she's using, but those are pulling in from instagram. So all she has to do is post instagram and it'll update without her even thinking about it. And then also you have the top, the top header follows you down as you go down. And so that's kind of a cool touch and you know, she's got purple in there, her hair is purple, her Mel Bell photography is all very um branded. Yeah, she's got a good brand going on and so you know, you can kind of flow through her website. So she's got photos of herself, she's got a really nice brand looking again, she's really good with colors and a lot of this stuff looking into Palm springs is like people are looking for local photographers that shoot in that area and that's where a lot of her kind of photos come. So I really like how she separated it into collections. So she does do a lot of different styles of photography because she's in such a small market, she's got to be able to do a lot of different things. Um and so yeah, so you can kind of go down and see the different styles. You know, she does boudoir maternity wedding, engagement, family, whatever tools she's using though. This is super cool to be able to just quickly go through, find, find what she's looking for if this is what you're interested in, you can go right to it or you can see the whole thing. I want to see what she's doing with these shoots if she has multiple. Yeah, it looks like she has a lot of the photos, so you can dive into each one and see a sort of collection. There's a lot of photos on her website and I think I remember talking about it, like she wanted people to spend time there and so this gives you so much time and this is like, again, this isn't like a log, but it's similar where, you know, after your shoot your wedding, this wedding, you share this collection with, you know, your client and it's probably somewhere where they're going to share with their friends and family. Let's see. She also has, well let's do the F. A. Q. S. First frequently asked questions. So this is where you can kind of like, you know, really hone in on what people ask you a lot. And I know that she did this because she was just getting constant emails and questions about a lot of stuff. So this is like for the person that provides, you know, needs a lot of information. So typically when someone calls her, they read a book, like they have figured everything out. And there's some some people who want to be the salesman and they want to reel someone in, catch them and then try to sell to them and hook them over the phone? Or in person? But there's also some people like her who just, they don't care about that and they want people to contact her when they're ready. And that's totally clearly she's been doing successful well, and she does what you mentioned earlier in the lesson about like having wedding, your pricing starting at a certain price and so that will cut out a certain clientele who can't afford that. But for anyone who can they can inquire about, I'm not gonna lie, I kind of helped her get some stuff off the ground here. So if you see some stuff going on, she's clearly taking it and ran with it and done a lot better than some other people that I know. So she also has this blog, I'm interested to see what this is. Okay, cool. So she has a couple posts and I'm guessing this is more where she writing a little bit more, maybe writing about a lot about it and then talked about the actual thing. She only has a couple there. I think she's probably falling back on that. But again, that's that's a thing of consistency, like that takes a lot of work and that's the downside of it. So if you have stuff like that, you've got to stay on top of it because I think I would be looking at that and being like, well, she hasn't posted in a while, but what does that mean? What does that mean? But really, she's so busy, like, I know she's constantly busy, so that's just another thing to stay on top of potentially. And just lastly, her contact page got her phone number there, which is kind of cool, direct email. Her social media links, yep. Social media links. Yeah, pretty cool. It's great. I think it's a wonderful, beautiful website. I think it's a good example of a different style and, you know, we're used to very cool. Well, if you have any questions about, you know, flow on a website, that's great. I think the thing is we could continue to show you examples, but it's probably a good idea, and you've done this probably before, is to search for photographers in your area, search and see photographer websites that you like, and just get inspiration from them, but also come up with your own style. And I think these ones are great examples of that. Coming up with your own style that really sells what you're trying to do with your photography, yep. Alright, see you in the next lesson