The Best Photography Website Templates: Introducing a New Series

***UPDATE: Below I say that I ultimately chose Photobiz as my solution. I did for my wedding site. But I’ve recently converted my personal site (as well as this site) to the new Photocrati WordPress themes. You can check out the themes here: Photocrati’s WordPress photography themes.

Of all the template shops I considered in my recent search for a new web template for danzerphotography.com, I ultimately chose Photobiz. Here is a screen shot of a gallery page on my site as it currently appears with thumbnails on the right:

Since I chose Photobiz, that should mean I think it’s the best choice out there, right? Perhaps, but not necessarily. Photobiz, like all template-style solutions has it’s own limitations. For some users, lack of flexibility, high cost, or search engine optimization challenges might mean trying another solution.

OVERVIEW

Photobiz is an all in one web solution for photographers. For a mixture of one time fees (to buy a template, set up shoppting carts etc) and monthly fees (for hosting), they handle everything: flash templates, hosting (in fact, you HAVE to host there, which is a limitation), online proofing and sales functionality so you can sell prints directly to clients, and a range of other functions and services.
Photobiz templates and the system for selecting them is at the heart of the Photobiz solution. They offer over 30 different templates, all with Flash and HTML equivalents, to choose from. One of the best features is that you’re allowed to change templates as often as you like. So if you decide you don’t like one (which I do often) you can change to another with a few mouse clicks. That’s incredibly useful. Their internal architecture ensures that all your galleries and information pages get convert seamlessly to the new theme.

OVERALL APPEARANCE

The main reason I chose Photobiz was that I liked the look of it’s websites. I wanted to try a flash site for my website this time, and Photobiz offers a ample array of beautiful flash templates and allows you to switch between them effortlessly. Their templates vary from traditional to modern, simple to decorative. You can see demos of most of their templates from their home page. Here is a screen shot of the template selection page in the back end where you can change your template with a few mouse clicks:

For each template, Photobiz offers an array of color palettes that can transform the look of your site even with the same template. They also offer the option of  setting your own colors – you can manually change the color of backgrounds, titles, text, menus, and other parts of the site.

While I have not set up the e-commerce functionality on my site yet, I should also note that the appearance of their online ordering pages seems quite elegant, simple, and user friendly. See below for full description.

The combination of beautiful templates, and the ability to not only choose between templates but customize colors within them means that, overall, I really give Photobiz high grades on appearance.

Grade: A

EASE OF USE

This is another strength of Photobiz. Their back end management system is super easy. I don’t think they could have made it any easier to add, substract, and change your website than they have. Here’s a quick look at the backend management system. When you first log in, you are taken to this page:

The round “Flash/HTML” icon on that screen shot, which takes you to all of your main site content. Here’s what you see when click that button and look at your site from the back end:

On the left hand side, you will see a list of pages and galleries. To make changes to any of those, you click on the relevant menu item. You change text using a normal text-edit box. And you upload photos with an easy-to-use, java-based upload system that looks much like the page above. You tell Photobiz which directory on you computer you want to upload photos from, and it show a list of thumbnails in that folder on your computer. You just select the ones you want, and click upload. The uploading process is relatively fast and glitch free.

Grade: A

FLEXIBILITY OF DESIGN

As already noted, there is substantial flexibility to choose between templates and customize colors within templates. That is, however, as far as the flexibility goes. While Photobiz’s template system creates all kinds of advantages, one of the biggest disadvantages is that you cannot customize your site in the myriad small ways you may be used to if you’ve had your own site in the past. You can’t add extra notes and announcements to your home page, and your home page title is limited to a specific number of characters.

What this ultimately comes down to: when you set up a site with Photobiz, you won’t have direct access to any of the html, css, or other files that comprise your website. Actually, since the sites are flash-based, even if you had access to the site files, making any adjustments would be very difficult. So it’s partly a function of flash, and partly a function of the fact that Photobiz only allows you to work on your site through their provided back end management system. You don’t get FTP or other access to the server.

As a consquence, YOUR ARE LIMITIED TO WHAT EVER DESIGNS AND FUNCTIONS PHOTOBIZ HAS THOUGHT TO PROVIDE. If you are technically savvy and like the ability to tweak the appearance of your site and add little extras here and there, that won’t happen at Photobiz.

Grade: D

BLOGGING CAPABILITY

None. The other, and perhaps even more important limitation to a Photobiz site, is that there is no blogging capability. If want to maintain a blog, you would need to host it on a different server and different domain name. Give the importance of blogging today as a critical way to interact with past or potential clients, that’s a surprising omission and big, big limitation, as least as far as I’m concerned.

Grade: F

E-COMMERCE FUNCTIONALITY

Now we move back into one of the potential strength areas for Photobiz. I haven’t set up e-commerce functionality on my site yet. It costs an extra $125, and I have not yet had a reason to pay the extra fee.

Once set up, a link appears on the top menu of your site that takes you to the main landing page for online proofing/shoppting galleries. The landing page can be set to show categories; within each category you can set up a list of galleries. Click in the galleries for thumbnails of images, and click on the thumbnails to see a particular image. Pretty straight forward.

Here’s an individual image page, where clients are able to place orders. You can see the interface on the upper right where clients can select print sizes, number of prints, etc, before adding the image to their cart.

There seems to be an upside and a down side to Photobiz’s e-commerce functionality. On the upside, their online ordering pages and seem remarkably elegant and user friendly. This seems to fit with their overall knack for design. Also on the upside, this functionality is remarkably easy to set up, and it’s great to have a beautiful selection of flash templates AND online ordering in the same place.

On the down side, while the Photobiz online ordering system takes orders for you, it DOES NOT offer order fulfillment. Once a client submits and order, Photobiz simply emails you with the order, and you must fulfill the order through your normal labs. I talked to a Photobiz representative about this, and they said they may add this functionality in the next year. They also noted that many photographers prefer it this way, because they can use their own preferred labs.

Personally, I would strongly prefer to be removed from the order fulfillment process, and have orders go directly to a lab, as happens with pro storefronts at places like Printroom or SmugMug. Individual order fulfillment can be very time consuming.

Grade: B

COST AND FEE STRUCTURE

So how much does this all cost? Clearly, Photobix is a premium template provider. They’re not selling based on price, but based on an impressive packages of services. Accordingly, Photobiz is very much on the expensive side of spectrum for photographer templates. Beyond that, I also find their fee structure a bit confusing in the sense that there are a lot of add on costs that you won’t expect if you are not paying very careful attention.

For most of their services, they charge a one time fee. For example, it costs $125 to get a flash template plus the right to switch templates as often as you like. It costs $45 to set up an HTML mirror of your flash site, $95 to set up online shopping functionality, etc.

On top of those one-time fees, you then pay a monthly that varies depending on the total number of images hosted on your site. On the low end, you can pay $15/month if you have 200 or less photos. On the high-end, it will cost you $100 if you have 12000 photos. For most photographers, the best level is someplace in the middle – say $60 for 3600 photos.

This monthly fee is the potential killer. If you are pro who shoots lots of weddings, for example, and you upload 500 images per wedding for your clients, those photos add up fast. You are going to need to pay between $60 and $100 per month to host all those images.

In addition, there are strange small fees that seem a bit stingy. For example, by default a website comes with 4-5 text pages – any non-gallery page with text on it, like your about page or the page where you describe your services. If you would like to add another text page, you have to pay a one-time fee of $15. Seems like an unnecessary way to extract a bit more from you.

Given all this, how much would it cost to set up a basic site? One time fees are $140, including flash template for $125 and an extra text page for $15. Monthly fees are $15 per month (for 200 or less total photos on your site). So the total for the first year: $320.

How much would it cost to set up a very complete site and take advantage of all Photobiz’s functionality? One time fees are $310, including flash tempate $125, HTML mirro4r $45, shopping cart and online ordering $125, an extra text page $15. Monthly fees are $60-100 (for 1800-12000 photos on your site). Total cost for first year: $1030-$1510.

Needless to say, that’s quite a bit. Obviously you’re getting a lot for the money. And, of course, if you compare it with the cost of hiring a web designer to create a flash html site with e-commerce functionality – which would cost $1500-5000 – it seems reasonable. But the difference is that if you keep your site with Photobiz, you will continue to pay this amount year after year, rather than just once for your own site. And the appropriate comparison here is not your own designer, but other templates you might consider.

Grade: C-

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Flash-based websites have traditionally created problems for search engines. This is of critical importance, since most traffic to most websites comes via search engines. What’s the point of having a beautiful site if it can’t be found?

The problem with flash is that search engines see your whole “flash unit” for lack of a better term, as a single image or video with no readable information. Because the text is effectively part of the flash animation, search engines cannot see it, and that’s how they generally determine the relevance of a given site. So you don’t get the same benefits of a text rich website.

There are a number of ways to mitigate the negative SEO-effects. Photobiz is obviously aware of this and provides a means to add meta tags to each of your pages.

From their FAQ: “Can I optimize my website for search engines? You will have the ability to add meta-tags to your website. We also offer useful links to submit your website for free to major search engines.”

But this only gets you so far. In addition to the internal SEO challenges, another related problem is that you can’t link to any of the individual pages on your site. You can only link to your homepage.

Grade: D

FREE TRIALS AND GUARANTEES

Photobiz offers a 30 Day Money Back Guarantee. I haven’t tried it, so I don’t know how easy it is to ask for a refund, but I’ll take them at their word and assume it’s relatively straight forward.

Grade: A

CONCLUSION

In short, Photobiz offers an impressive array of beautiful flash templates, and allows you to switch between them for free. The templates, the back end management system, and online ordering system underscore that Photobiz has some great designers who know how to make websites that look great and are very easy to use, all while packing powerful functionality.

On the downside, Photobiz occupies the most expensive end of the spectrum for template-style solutions at $300-$1500 for the first year. It lacks flexibility for tweaking a site if you are the tech-savvy type and, more important, lacks any blogging functionality. It’s online order system, while elegant, does not offer any order fulfillment, so you still have to do that part yourself.

Overall Grade: B+/A-

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For most photographers, the word “portfolio” evokes images of a physical “portfolio” of images, often in a big black portfolio case, that represents who you are as a photographer. There are still a few situations when such classic portfolios are relevant—for example, if you are applying for a prestigious art gallery, going to visit a high-dollar commercial photography client, or meeting in person with prospective wedding clients.

But for most photographers most of the time, the traditional “portfolio” has always been of limited value. That’s not to say most photographers don’t use portfolios. Indeed, every time a photographer sends a submission to a magazine, stock agency, or other prospective buyer—whether slides, prints, or an email with digital images—that photographer is sending a portfolio. In this case, each portfolio is different, depending on the client.

Today, however, the portfolio concept is taking on yet another connotation. In the digital era, your website is your portfolio.

A website is like a conventional portfolio in that it showcases your best work and presents an overall impression of your style and identity. Yet a website is also much more powerful. It offers an enormous range of creative design possibilities. And it is capable of reaching hundreds or thousands of people with relatively little extra work on your part. It’s also the first impression that most prospective buyers will have of your work.

Even the conventional situations above—art galleries, high-end commercial assignments, and weddings—most clients will see your website before they see anything else. Many stock agencies and buyers will now simply ask for a link to your website instead of asking for a submission of photos.

So in the digital era, the question “do you need a portfolio” is synonymous with the question “do you need a website.” And the answer is yes, absolutely. And you need to give your website — it style, the images it includes, the aura it projects — the same attention you might have given to preparing a portfolio in a bygone era. It’s the most critical step you can take to start selling photos and getting clients.

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It’s been an educational experience, and it’s given me a great feel for the landscape of the wedding photography industry. One of the most insightful aspects of this is seeing what kind of things separate the best from the rest.

The best wedding photographers are those who produce awesome, modern, artistic imagery. They combine great composition and lighting with incredible post processing to produce breath-taking imagery. But more than that, they are the ones who build distinctive, bold brands for their work that separate them from the rest. They participate in groups like the WPJA, ISPWP, Modern Photographers, Photographik, and now Best of Wedding Photography, and they use their participation in those groups to enhance their credibility and reputations among brides and prospective clients. They position themselves at the top of the market, shooting premium and destination weddings. These people shoot 30-200 weddings per year, at prices averaging between $3,000-$6,000 per year. If you multiply those numbers out, you’ll see that they really add up. For many of these photographers, it’s not uncommon to shoot destination weddings in Europe or the Caribbean for $10,000 or more. Many of these photographers share their knowledge, and add a lot to their bottom lines, by launching their own workshop series in which they’ll teach everything they know to you and a dozen others over a weekend for $850.

These are the people who don’t just scrape by as photographers, they thrive and prosper.

So how do you get there?

I’m not primarily a wedding photographer. My background is in photojournalism in Asia, and now I spend most of my time bringing photographers together for big projects like Photocrati or Best of Wedding Photography. But I have a good business mind, and exposure to the greats in wedding photography has given me a sense for exactly the steps I WOULD take if I wanted to join these photographers at the pinnacle of the industry.

I don’t plan to go that route, but rather than let the knowledge go to waste, I thought I’d go ahead and share my thoughts with any of you who think you’d like to try it. So here are the steps. I honestly believe that someone who did these with focused energy could establish themselves at among top in the field within about 2 years. The key point here is that you need to know what they know and do what they do. That means that you will need to invest in training, resources, branding and advertising. Many would-be photographers balk at such investments, but keep in mind that this is business, not a hobby. Every business requires investment – nothing ventured, nothing gained.

1. Achieve technical mastery by learning from the masters and using Photoshop Actions

You can’t thrive and prosper in this field unless you master the ability to produce consistently outstanding imagery. That appears to be a daunting challenge in part because most people learn slowly through trial and error or through reading books. You can dramatically accelerate your learning curve by finding people who produce the kind of outstanding imagery you want to produce, and taking a small, intensive workshops with them to see, first hand, how they do what they do. You model them, get feedback, and quickly and dramatically improve. Right now, if I were going to invest in one workshop, I’d do it with David Beckstead.

One important note here is that there are two distinctive steps in producing great imagery – the actual shooting, in which your ability to read light and compose are the critical talents, and post processing, in which your expertise with Lightroom and Photoshop is critical. In fact, my recent experience leads me to believe that the quality of post processing is now as important or possibly more important than your shooting skills. The top photographers are masters of post-processing. The fastest way to start post-processing like them it to buy a set of Photoshop actions, perhaps like those from KJImages. I would absolutely find a photographer who’s actions you like, buy them, and start using them. To be honest, I can’t think of a single step that would more immediately and dramatically improve the imagery of most wedding photographers.

2. Build your wedding photography portfolio with free shoots and model shoots

If you are an established photographer with a large body of work, but with imagery that doesn’t compare with the top people, I’d invest a few weeks re-processing my images from the last few years with new photoshop actions, and create a new portfolio of exquisite imagery that way. I’d strip everything off of my site that didn’t have the cool, fresh, modern style that premium brides are looking for. You need to be brutally honest with yourself. I’ve seen a lot photographers with 20 years of experience and good client and referral bases, but they are still shooting and post processing with a style circa 10 years ago, or even circa the 1980s. The top photographers produce bold, modern, and artistic imagery. That’s the kind of work that brides at the top of the market are looking for. Look at their sites, and compare what they’re producing with what you’re producing.

If you are newer and just starting out, you need to get shooting. I would begin offering free portrait and engagement shoots to build up my portfolio. That’s a great way to build up not just your portfolio but your client list. Free engagement shoots are particularly valuable for newbies. The benefits: you get the experience of working with clients; you get the images for your portfolio; if you do a great job on engagements shoots, they’ll likely use you for their wedding; and you’ll get word of mouth referrals.

You’ll also need to build your portfolio of wedding images. One great way to do this is to hire models with wedding garb. This can be expensive, but it allows you to tightly control your shooting situations and work with people who know how to make your photos look great. A lot of top photographers use model shoots to produce some of their more exquisite and distinctive imagery. If I were you, I would also offer my camera for free as a second shooter to an established photographers, on the understanding that you get to keep a selection of the images to display on your own portfolio.

3. Get an awesome website with a great, sidebar-less WordPress BLOG

If you don’t have one already, get a professional caliber website. For your portfolio site, get a slick, flash-based site. I know, I know, many people (including myself) talk down about flash because of it’s SEO disadvantages. But flash sites display with a quality and pizazz that is just not achievable any other way. To get around the SEO disadvantages, you need to set up a blog on a separate domain. In fact, many people are using ONLY blogs, and skipping the flash portfolio. If you are shooting enough to keep your blog regularly updated, I think that’s a reasonable approach. But regardless, you must have a blog, and it must be a great looking blog. I would opt for a WordPress based blog WITHOUT a sidebar. Photocrati is about to release some great themes of that kind. The other great place to look, albeit rather expensive, is prophotoblogs.com.

4. Invest in a great logo and bold, distinctive brand

Great branding is second only to great imagery in distinguishing the great photographers. What is great branding? When people come to your site, what they see should be unusual, distinctive, bold, fun. Your site and style should stick in their minds. Achieving this effect is a combination of the name you choose for your business, the logo you have to represent you, the colors of your site, and the kind and quality of your imagery. For me, a great example of branding is Our Labor of Love photography. They have a great, unusual name, and that combined with the logo and distinctive image on their home page makes me remember them (and brides will remember them too).

Part of your brand is also market positioning. The best photographers in the world position themselves at the top of the market. They’re looking for brides who are willing to pay $3-10,000 for truly outstanding imagery. That’s where you need to move as quickly as possible, rather than competing with the masses for $1000-$1500 weddings. To justify the higher prices, you need to be able to produce outstanding imagery, which is why the training above is so important.

5. Master SEO

Any business today must master SEO – this is not distinctive to photographers. If you can get on the front page of Google for a specific set of keywords, and you have a decent site, you WILL get a endless stream of leads. If this is the only thing you did to promote yourself, you could still be highly successful in terms of bringing in a lot of wedding photography business. There’s a lot that goes into producing great SEO results. Sometime soon, we’re going to start offering SEO training and services for photographers through Photocrati. We’ve developed a great strategy there, and although Photocrati is just 9 months old, we now get 80,000 visitors per month, about half of which are from Google. Since we’re not offering those services yet, let me give you two other tips to get started.

First, while you want to do basic SEO steps for your flash portfolio site, you want to focus most of your SEO efforts on your blog. For many reasons, blogs do better.

Second, when you do SEO, you need to orient your efforts around specific keywords. In your case, the selection of those keywords is easy. You want to show up for “[location] wedding photographer” where location is nearest large metropolitan city or town. If you are near Denver, you want to show up on page one for Denver Wedding Photographer searches. That will be more valuable to you than, say, Denver Wedding Photography. You need to make sure that those keywords are prominent in your site title (ie, “Denver Wedding Photographer – John Smith”) would be a good title. And make sure those keywords appear throughout your site. Use those terms in the titles of your blog posts.

Third, you need to start getting links back to your site. Submit your site to relevant, quality directories (either photography-related directories, or the big, important ones like the Yahoo! directory or Dmoz). Every time you do a shoot, post photos from it on your blog and let your clients know. They’ll link back to you, and those will boost your rankings. Comment on other blogs and link back to your own site that way. Produce great content on your blog that other people consider worth linking to. One idea is ask some great photographer if you can interview them for your blog, then post the interview. Mostly likely that person or others will link to the interview. Finally, you sometimes just need to go out and ask for links. Email website owners, comment on why like their sites, and politely but unabashedly ask if they’d be willing to link back to you. Uncomfortable, yes, but also critical.

There are a lot of other link building strategies, but that should at least get you started. The other big thing I might suggest is taking a workshop such as one with Lawrence at ToFurious here  or one with us at Photocrati when we get it our services launched.

6. Advertise via Google Adwords and Strive for High Conversion Rates

In addition to your SEO efforts, or until they kick in, you should also plan on investing a substantial amount of money in Google Adwords advertising. If you cannot appear in the organic search results for “[your location] wedding photographer” then you need to appear in the paid search results for those terms. If brides go to Google and search for those keywords, they are looking for someone to shoot their wedding. They are ready to buy, and that’s precisely the time you want to be in front of them. Once you dominate search results, or once you’ve built a powerful client base with a lot of referrals, you can drop this advertising. But for now, you need to think of this as a necessary business expense to build your client base and brand awareness.

Paid search can be expensive. You may layout as much as $1000 per month to be in the top 1-5 keywords throughout the month. But keep in mind that if you charge $2000 for wedding, you only need to get one wedding every two months to break even on your advertising.

Conversion Rates. One important side note to this is that if you are going to do Google Adwords, you need to take every possible step to increase your CONVERSION RATE. If 200 people click on your paid search result during the course of a month, and each click costs you $3, then you’ve spent $600 on advertising. Conversion rates online tend to vary between .5% and 6% depending on the quality of your site, your marketing message, the quality of your imagery, and lots of other things. A conversion rate of .5% mean you’ll get 1 job from those 200 clicks. A conversion rate of 2% means you’ll get 4 jobs. If those are weddings with an average price of $2000, then 1 job = $2000 and 4 jobs = $8000. That means that a very small improvement in your conversion rate (1.5%) produces $6000 in additional revenue. That’s why conversion rates are so important.

How do you increase your conversion rate? That’s a science unto itself, and I could write a small book on it. But for now some things to keep in mind are: only display your best imagery; make it very, very easy and tempting for people to contact you; use various methods to enhance your credibility (membership in wedding photography groups, awards, etc); if you are just starting out, give people a risk free way to try you out, such as free engagement sessions. You need to spend time and energy on a free engagement session, but if you do a great job, the wedding will be yours.

7. Join Every Wedding Photography Group You Can

This get’s to the last point above about enhancing your credibility. Brides are more likely to see you as established and successful if you are a member of the WPJA, or the ISPWP, or Modern Photographers, or some other group. Of course, to get into these groups, you need to meet various standards, and that’s why their valuable. Some are more prestigious than others, such as the Grace Ormonde Platinum List. We’re trying to create the most prestigious of all with Best of Wedding Photography, but that’s invitation only and you can’t get an invitation until you’ve already established yourself at the top.

Once you are a member of these groups, display their badges prominently on your site.

Many of these groups run competitions on a quarterly basis. If you are a member, enter the contests. Winning third place in a quarterly WPJA competition allows you to write “International Award Winning Wedding Photojournalist” on your website, and that will increase your conversion rate (see above). The more such awards you have, the more credibility you will have, and the more likely brides on your website will call you up and try you out. Of course, to win these awards, you need to produce great imagery and that, again is why you need to invest in the technical training above. It’s the starting point for everything else.

8. Build Relationships with other Wedding Vendors

So far, I’ve focused on online mechanisms for building your client base. But another important mechanism is meeting, networking, and building relationships with great wedding vendors in your area. You are looking for wedding planners, cake makers, florist shops, wedding and reception venues, and other providers of wedding-related services. When you find ones you like, go meet them and introduce yourself. Stay in touch.  Add them as preferred vendors on your own website – that is, you direct brides on your site to those vendors. You send them business referrals. And if you do good work, and you build good relationships, they will list you likewise on their websites and materials and send business to you. Getting plugged into that kind of wedding vendor network can transform your business, so it’s worth the time and energy you need to put into building the relationships.

A great way to build these relationships, as well as get more clients directly, is to attend bridals shows. If you have not done so, find the big ones in your area and do what’s necessary to sign up and attend.

9. Build Relationships with Other Great Wedding Photographers

There’s an old saying that you become like the people you spend the most time with. Ideally, you want to spend more time training with, corresponding with, and meeting with top photographers. Call up the best photographers in your area and ask if they’d be willing to spend 30 minutes sometime in the next month sharing their wisdom in exchange for lunch. Take workshops with the best photographers. Find the best photographers in places like Digital Wedding Forum, and interact with them via the forums. Consider asking top photographers if you can interview them for your blog – start an interview series. There are a lot of ways to break the ice and begin interacting with top photographers. The more you do, the more their knowledge and strategies will rub off on you.

10. The Transition: Moving Toward the Pinnacle of the Market + Destination Weddings

As you build a larger client base, a better portfolio with great imagery, and a better reputation with stronger branding, you need to keep focusing your efforts on moving toward the top of the market. Raise your prices, be more selective, radiate excellence from your site and blog. You would much rather shoot 20 wedding per year at $4000 each than 40 weddings per year at $2000. Same income with fewer clients and less work.

One step that distinguishes the best photographers is also a move toward destination weddings. Most top photographers shoot A LOT of wedding that are not in their own geographic locations. They travel around their countries or to increasingly exotic destinations to shoot weddings. You should make this a focus. Why? There are several reasons. First, destination weddings pay more. When people are willing to fly you to New York or Mexico for a wedding, that means they really want you. Destination weddings often pay$7-10,000 or more. Second, destination weddings add an elite flavor to your branding. If you can say you regularly shoot destination weddings in this or that exotic location, it enhances your credibility and attractive even to brides who want a local wedding. Third and finally, destination weddings often produce spectacular wedding imagery. The images from a beach wedding in the Caribbean make a GREAT addition to your portfolio.

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Ultimately, you want your branding, website, blog, imagery, and relationships to look like those that distinguish the top wedding photographers. Study the greats, emulate them, train with them to accelerate the learning curve dramatically. If you walk, talk, shoot, process, and look like a top wedding photographer, eventually you will BE a top wedding photographer. The big thing to recognize is that looking and acting like the top photographers is NOT as difficult as it might look. If you have good photographic talent and a decent business mind, you have the basic resources you need. After that, it’s just a question of learning what they know, emulating them as much as possible, and spending time with them. Once you’ve emulated them successfully and mastered what they know, you can start innovating and pushing yourself in directions even they have not gone.

UPDATE: You can also get started by checking out the work of some of the masters in the field. Here’s a selection from Best of Wedding Photography from around the world:

INTERNATIONAL WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHERS
Italy Wedding Photographers
Mexico Wedding Photographers
United Kingdom Wedding Photographers
France Wedding Photographers
Toronto Wedding Photographers
Vancouver Wedding Photographers
Spain Wedding Photographers
Tuscany Wedding Photographers
London Wedding Photographers
Switzerland Wedding Photographers
Riviera Maya Wedding Photographers
Bahamas Wedding Photographers
Greece Wedding Photographers

US-BASED WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHERS
Los Angeles Wedding Photographers
New York City Wedding Photographers
Hawaii Wedding Photographers
San Francisco Wedding Photographers
Boston Wedding Photographers
Miami Wedding Photographers
Seattle Wedding Photographers
Atlanta Wedding Photographers
Napa Valley Wedding Photographers
Orange County Wedding Photographers
Denver Wedding Photographers
Charleston Wedding Photographers
Minneapolis Wedding Photographers
San Diego Wedding Photographers
Chicago Wedding Photographers
Kansas City Wedding Photographers
Portland Wedding Photographers
Philadelphia Wedding Photographers
Washington DC Wedding Photographers
Phoenix Wedding Photographers
Houston Wedding Photographers
Virginia Wedding Photographers

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This is the third article in a series on the best photography website templates. Also see:

The Best Photography Website Templates: Introducing a New Series

Review of Photobiz Website Templates

Also, Photocrati has just released an outstanding set of WordPress themes for photographers. Unlike Photobiz, Printroom, and most other solutions, these templates combine gallery management and blogging in one package.

Overview of Printroom.com Online Storefronts

Printroom.com offers online storefronts for photographers. Although still in the realm of website templates, Printroom.com is an entirely kind of solution from Photobiz-style templates. After setting up an account, you upload images to your Printroom site. They offer very few choices regarding the appearance of your “homepage” or galleries, and very little flexibility. The major advantage of Printroom and similar sites like Smugmug is the integration of galleries, shopping carts, and order fulfillment. In a Printroom store, your clients can browse images, select what they want in terms of print sizes and styles, speciality items, even digital downloads. They checkout and pay, and Printroom alerts you to the order. If you have not done so already, they will ask you to upload high resolution versions of the relevant images. And that’s it. Printroom handles all order fulfillment – printing, packaging, shipping.

I’d like to emphasize something up front. In some sense, comparing Printroom or other “pro storefronts” to full-blown website solutions like Photobiz is unfair. I can’t imagine any pro photographer using a Printroom store front as their sole or even primary online presence. Printroom just doesn’t offer the kind of attractive templates or customization options that allow photographers to present their online portfolios in all their glory. Usually, Printroom is a secondary site, one used to store client images after a shoot and give clients the ability to browse and, most important, order prints. That’s the best use of Printroom.

Overall Appearance

I personally find this to be a weak aspect of Printroom.com. They are not alone, sadly. Compared to the beauty and elegance of Photobiz flash templates, I find both the home pages and gallery pages at most printing-companies-cum-online-storefronts to be elementary looking and clumsy, especially the galleries. Above is a screen shot of my Printroom.com homepage; below is a shot of one of my galleries.

The design elements are very basic. The homepage is passable, although very lacking in flexibility. The galleries are just unnecessarily ugly. I don’t like using such a strong word, but if a duck quacks…  I’ve spent a lot of time staring at my gallery page, trying to figure out what bothers me about the look. It’s partly the white “shadows” cast to the right and bottom of each image. It’s partly the design of the toggle boxes and magnifying glasses.

The individual images page are just a bit better. Here is a screenshot:

I like the large image with thumbnails on top. But the little table to the right of the images, where clients are supposed to type the number and type of images they want, have the same 1990s-clumsy-but-gets-the-job-done look. It’s just a plain flat table with hard square lines.

And, again, the final shopping cart, pictured below, has the same look.

I have to admit that the appearance may not bother everyone. I’m continually trying to figure out if it really is ugly, or if it’s just a matter of personal taste. I’ve provided the screen shots, so ultimately you can decide.

New Flash Sites

Printroom may recognize that they are lacking the design area. They have very recently introduced new Flash websites. These sites are a marked improvement over the basic html homepages of yesteryear (above). They are quite passable. But, again, all things in comparison. Compared to Photobiz templates, the Printroom Flash templates look like first drafts. They have somehow managed to import the same clunky looking into their flash sites that undermines their html sites. Here are three sample flash website that Photobiz links to as samples.

http://www.printroom.com/studio_homepage.asp?userid=robynsdesigns

http://www.printroom.com/studio_homepage.asp?userid=ClarkLara

http://www.printroom.com/studio_homepage.asp?userid=rarroyo02

Looking at these, I am somehow underwhelmed. I’m not sure if it’s the fact that the image areas are all the same stock light gray, or if its the use of tabs for the menu, or the overall sense that the site has chunks (background and image area) that don’t work together as a unified whole.

Grade: D for HTML sites, C for Flash sites

Ease of Use

This is a mixed area for Printroom. The main back-end management area is good enough. Below are three screenshots to give you a sense of the feel and functionality of the Printroom Backend. The first is a screen shot of what you see when you first log in. You can see the various menu items (square buttons) and you can see a list of galleries. The second screen shot is what you see if you click on a gallery. Here, you can change image names and order proofs. Finally the third screenshot is the page on which you set prices for prints and products of various sizes. You can prices specific for each gallery, which allows you to tailor your pricing to particular clients (say wedding versus your travel poster gallery).

I find this back-end management area fairly easy to use, which is a big feat given the amount of functionality for ordering and pricing. For image uploading, they encourage you to use their own software, Pro Studio Manager, which you download and install on your computer. This software allows you to create galleries, import images, delete images, and make other adjustments on your computer. You then upload or synchronize, and the software batch uploads your images and re-creates any changes.

I must say that I found this to be an awkward solution. I don’t like having to down load new software, first of all. But then you have to be vary cautious about making changes within the backend management area, since synchronization seems to run just one way, from Pro Studio Manager to your site. They encourage to you to make ALL changes in their software. I guess it just seems to me that there should be a simpler way – something that’s quick and easy and online.

(By the way, while we’re on the topic of ease of use, there is one more thing to comment on. Printroom makes another software package called Printroom direct, which is supposed to allow Photographers to upload images and order prints and products easily and separate from whether or not you have a Printroom storefront. AVOID this at all costs. When I was doing a lot of work with Printroom, this software was the bane of my existence. It’s slow, impenetrable, and senseless. Well, I should add a caveat. I haven’t used the software in over a year. I thought about trying it again so I could include something in this review, but I just can’t do it. I like you, my readers, but not that much.)

Grade: B

Flexibility of Design

This is another weak spot (there are strong spots, really, coming below). Printroom store fronts offer very little flexibility and very few options for customization.
As with Photobiz, you don’t have access to the source files that comprise you’re site, so you can’t make any individual tweaks you might like. You can’t add extra notes and announcements or elements to your home page. For technically skilled people, this may be a big turn-off.  At Photobiz, this lack of access is offset a bit because they’ve provided a good number of built-in options. You’re still hostage to the options they provide, but at least there are options. Printroom provides very few options for customization of your pages.

In fact, you can see for yourself. Here is your online store front set up page. This includes all the options you have:

They have added a new bit of flexibility with the option of flash websites. But again, the options for customization seem quite limited once you’ve had a chance to fool around with Photobiz. Below is the how Printroom describes the functionality and customization options of their Flash pages:
* Sleek, clean design
* Create your own slideshow- upload up to 15 of your images
* Upload your logo- or create a text header with a wide selection of fonts
* Custom background colors to match your style
* About Us page, Contact Us page, and a custom page that you can define
* Online tool allows you to create your site in minutes
* Integrated Storefront with your photo galleries displayed right on your homepage

If you want to test drive their “flash homepage tool” you can do so and get a very clear sense for what’s possible. Click on the demo link here:

http://www.printroom.com/info/Store_Front_Designer.asp?

Grade: D

Blogging Capability

None. There is no blogging capability. If want to maintain a blog, you would need to host it on a different server and different domain name. Given the importance of blogging today as a critical way to interact with past or potential clients, that’s a surprising omission and big, big limitation, as least as far as I’m concerned.

Grade: F

E-Commerce Functionality

Now we finally move solidly into one of the big strength areas of Printroom. Indeed, it is the main reason Printroom exists. Printroom is a storefront. It’s designed to provide browsable galleries in which client can select, customize, and order photos. Although the appearance isn’t always elegant, it does this very well.

One of the big weaknesses of Photobiz is that although they have a shopping cart, they do cannot provide any order fulfillment services. Well, Printroom is a printing company. So the integration between online shopping and order fulfillment is essentially seamless. If you are not picky about which photo lab you use, this can be a HUGE time saver.

As I noted in the introduction, Printroom is not really designed to be a stand alone website solution. Most photographer use it as a secondary site to host photos for clients and provide online ordering options. For that purpose, the seamless integration of galleries, online shopping carts, payment, and order fulfillment is great.

Grade: A

Cost and Fee Structure

The fee structure for Printroom is fairly straightforward. They offer three membership levels. The first level is free. That’s right, you can set up a Printroom storefront for free. This membership comes with limited space for images, no option for flash websites, and limited support from Printroom, but it’s still a good way to get started. How does Printroom make money? Easy – they charge you when you order prints. Printroom is after all a printing company. They figure if you set up a free account with them, and upload galleries, you are more likely to use their printing services. Which is true.

At the second level you can buy a pro member ship for $9.99 per month or $99 per year. This membership comes with 1GB of storage space, the option to use flash, and more or less full support. It’s important to note that this compares very favorably with Photobiz, which costs more than $99 just for initial set up PLUS a much higher monthly fee. At $99 per year, Printroom pro is still a very affordable solution.

At the third level, you can buy a premium membership for $199 per year or $19.99 per month. This level comes with unlimited storage and a range of options like the ability to create a fully customized flash website and priority support from Printroom.

In addition to their monthly or annual fee, Printroom also charge a printing cost, but this would be paid anywhere and Printroom’s charges for printing are quite reasonable. A 4X6 print costs $0.39 and an 8X10 $2.99.

Grade: A

Search Engine Optimization

This is a huge weak area for Printroom. Despite the fact that the URL for my Printroom includes my name (www.printroom.com/pro/erickdanzer), my Printroom site has never shown up on the first page of search results EVEN WHEN SEARCHING FOR MY OWN NAME. Needless to say, if your site doesn’t show up when you search for yourself, you’ve got problems. I just did a test and searched for myself. My Printroom site shows up on page 4 of search results. By comparison, my main site erickdanzer.com is the number one result, and my Photobiz site shows up on page one.

I don’t what the problem is with Printroom’s SEO structure, but it is clearly not a place where you will “be found” unless someone is actively looking for you.

Grade: F

Free Trials and Guarantees

Photobiz offers a free membership, so you can test drive it completely as long as you like. Hard to beat that for free trials.

Grade: A

Conclusion

In short, Printroom offers a great service: seamless integration of online galleries, print ordering and shopping cart functionality, payment processing, and photo printing and order fulfillment. This kind of service is hugely convenient if you shoot events and want to offer browsable galleries and online ordering to clients. And they offer this service at a very reasonable price. Back-end management is reasonably straightforward

On the downside, their online storefronts and galleries can be visually unappealing. They’ve made some improvements in this area with the introduction of Flash websites, but even their Flash sites are not nearly as beautiful or elegant as some of the others out there. In addition, Printroom sites lack flexibility and options for customization (with some exception for premium members), lack blogging capability, and have an awkward system for image uploading. These sites are terrible as far as search engine optimization is concerned.

The bottom line, as I’ve mentioned several times, is that Printroom probably isn’t a good option for a stand alone site to represent your work, but it is a good secondary option for offering galleries and online ordering to clients. For you main web site — the online portfolio that represents you to the world — you will want a solution that offers more visual impact, greater flexibility, and, ideally, blogging capability.

Overall Grade: C

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So here are some tips on how to get started with Google Adwords and how to make sure you get the biggest bang for your advertising dollars.

Have a good website

Before you start, let me underscore that you need to have a good website. Ideally, you’ll have a great website. With Google Adwords, you will be sending prospective clients to your site. So the overall design and functionality, as well as the images you have in your online portfolio need to be of sufficient quality that they will convince at least some of people who come that you are worth contacting.

Set up your Google Adwords account if you don’t already have one

Assuming you’ve good a high caliber website, the other basic thing you need is a Google Account. You can set one of these up very quickly and easily. Just go to www.google.com, click on Business Solutions underneath the search box, click on Adwords, and follow the instructions.

Add a new Adwords campaign and set your settings

Now it’s time to get started. Once you are inside your Adwords account, you will want to click the Campaign Summary tab, and then click “New Campaign.”  This brings us to a quick aside about the structure of campaigns and ad groups. A campaign is highest level categorization. Use different campaigns for very different projects (ie, say one campaign for you wedding photography, and one campaign for your corporate product or real estate photography). Within each campaign, you may want to have different ads that use different titles and keywords.

GEOGRAPHIC TARGETING. When you are first setting up your campaign, there are a few settings you need to pay close attention to. One of the most important is geographic targeting.

If you live in Atlanta Georgia, and you are trying to find wedding clients, you don’t really need your ads to show up for users in Oregon. Google gives you the ability to narrowly limit the geographic space in which your ads appear. So you might set the geographic targeting to the state of Georgia. That way, any users in Georgia searching for “wedding photographer” will see your ads. But those in other states will not. That can save you a lot of wasted advertising revenue.

TOTAL BUDGET AND MAXIMUM COST PER CLICK. You will also need to set your daily budget and your maximum cost per click. These two amounts are obviously related: if you have a high total budget and a low cost per click, you’ll be able to generate more traffic on your site and more leads. If you have a low budget and high cost per click, then you’ll get less.

Your cost per click is critical here. The CPC is how much you pay every time someone clicks on one of your ads. It determines how quickly you blow through your advertising dollars, but it also determines where you ads appear in the list of ads that appear alongside Google search results. The higher your ads appear in the list of ads, the more clicks you will receive.

Unfortunately, the ideal CPC varies from keyword to keyword and is largely determined by the amount of competition over any given key word. If you specialize is Poodle Photography, and you want your ads to appear every time some types “poodle photos” in Google, then you’re probably not going to face high competition, and you can set a low CPC (maybe .15/click) and still appear very high if not first in the list.

If, by contrast, you want to appear on the first page of search results for “denver wedding photographer”, you may need to increase your cost per click to $6 or higher just to appear on bottom of the first page. (I know this because I’ve had to go that high several times over the past month for my own Adwords campaign for wedding photography in Colorado).

So your cost per click is partly out of your control. You can set it at initially what ever level you want, from 1 cent to $10 or more, but you will want to adjust your CPC strategically. In short, your goal is to find the lowest CPC that will get you onto the first page for your keywords and, ideally, will get you into the 4th position or higher.

It’s important to note that you DON’T need to be the first result. The difference in click throughs for spots 1-3 are not all that different, and you can save a bit of money by appearing a bit lower.

The combination of your CPC and your daily budget will determine the maximum number of visitors you get each day. If your max CPC is $.20 and you set a daily budget of 10, then you will get about fifty visitors a day on your site. If your CPC is $1, you’ll get ten.

TURN OFF CONTENT NETWORK. There’s one last setting you should adjust. You’ll probably want to turn off the “Content Network”. You know all those Google ads you see when you are tooling around on websites? Those are the content network. For some kind of advertising these spots are very valuable.

In this case, however, you want to put your ads in front of people are looking for your kind of services RIGHT NOW. If you are a Chicago portrait photographer, your target audience includes people actively looking for Chicago portrait photographers. And those are the people going to search engines and typing “Chicago portrait photographers.” If you leave the content network on, your ads can appear on any site where key words like chicago, portrait, photographer appear. Those might be photography blogs or news articles or something else. But in any case, someone who sees your ads while reading a photography blog is not likely to become a client. And you will still need to pay when they click on your ad. So it’s better to keep your campaign as targeted as possible.

Tips on Designing Adwords Ads

A google ad includes a one line title (maximum of 25 characters) and two lines of description (maximum of 35 characters each). So you have three lines of 25, 35, and 35 characters. That is not very much space in which to convey your message, so you really need to give it some some thought and make every word count.

In choosing your title and description, try to empathize with your customers and think about what they would want to see. If you were looking for a photographer in your line of work, what kind of headline and description would compel you to click?

It’s needs to be descriptive, clearly conveying what kind of photography you do. You may want it to include buzz words in your area of photography. In wedding photography, for example, photojournalism or photojournalistic-style wedding photography is very popular.

You may also want to include specific reference to your geographic area. Many people are looking for photographer that work in the same city, so they will more likely to click when they see their location in your ad.

Another important tip is that you may want to create different ads with different wording for each of your important key words. For my wedding photography business here in Colorado for example, I have separate ads for Denver Wedding Photography, Boulder Wedding Photography, Wedding Photojournalism, Engagement Photography, and other key words. The trick is to match the wording in the ads to the keywords that people are searching for. If some one is searching for “denver wedding photographer,” then they are more likely to click on an ad that includes those same key words.

The great thing about Adwords is that you can create as many different ads as you want, even one for every keywords, at no extra charge.

Making Adjustments

Once you’ve created your ads, they will start to run and you will immediately generate some relevant traffic and potential leads for your site. At this point you will need to constantly go in adjust your ad settings. If your ads are not appearing on the first page for relevant terms, then you may need to increase you CPC. If you are appearing in the #1 spot for everything, you can reduce your CPC and save some money. Depending on which ads seems to be generating higher click throughs, you may adjust wording of other ads or create new, more effective ones.

How Much to Spend?

Finally, you may want to control you overall spending by increasing or decreasing your daily budget.

The budget issue brings us to a final point. Be careful with Adwords. It’s easy to spend a lot of money on Adwords advertising. You can set a budget of $1-200 per day and generate tons of traffic. But you’re also spending $3-6000 per month on advertising. Set a budget of $20, and you are $600 per month.

How much should you spend? Think like a business person. How much you spend depends on the returns. If you sell wedding packages for $1500, you can spend $1500 in advertising, get one job and cover the costs. Of course, that doesn’t leave any profit for you or any money to cover your overhead.

In large part, how much you spend depends on your “conversion rate” – the percentage of people who come to your site and actually decide to use your services. You should assume that less than 5% of visitors will become clients. A good estimate is 2%. Using that number, if you send 100 people to your site at a CPC of $1, then you have spent $100 in advertising.

If you have a good website, somewhere between 1 and 5 of those people will contact you and strongly consider buying your services. If you are charging $300 per shoot, then that’s $3-1500 in revenue depending on your conversion rate. As you can see, a high conversion rate dramatically increases the returns on your advertising dollars. That’s why having a good site is so important.

Unfortunately, you probably can’t precisely guess your conversion rate. You will need to launch your campaign, watch the numbers, and adjust accordingly.

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Do you use Adwords? If so, how has your experience been? If not, why not?

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But I’d push you to move beyond simple site design and think creatively about all the other content you might add to attract people to your site, enhance your reputation, and increase your income. While the types of content you might add are limited only by your imagination, you might start by considering things like blogs, reviews, or advice. Blogs, especially, are becoming almost standard for many pro photographers.

Why? First, good quality content attracts more viewers and more potential clients, and keeps them coming back to your site. That is, it generates traffic. High traffic helps you indirectly by getting your name out there and expanding your reputation. It helps you directly by generating more leads for your photography. And, if you manage your site well, it will help you directly by generating immediate sales and advertising revenue from your site.

By far the most common type of additional content today, and easiest to start and develop, is the blog, one of the great new communication forms of the web. As I’m sure readers here know, blogs deal with all kinds of subjects: photography, law, politics, economics. There are many blogs that don’t seem to deal with anything at all. They just circulate gossip or recount people’s personal stories. There are at least two broad categories of blogs that you can consider adding to your photography site: a blog targeting other photographers, or a blog targeting prospective and past clients.

Client-oriented blogs

Client-oriented blogs are by far the most common for pro photographers. On a client-oriented blog, you write light fare about recent photographic work you’ve been doing, post samples from recent shoots, announce new projects, and offer personal ruminations about your photography work. Much of the content is specifically client-related – “check out this photo from my wedding last weekend…Mark and Lisa were great!” But other posts may be of a more personal or general nature – “I was out at Red Rocks park yesterday taking landscape photographs. The lighting was brilliant, and it made me think about …..”

The overall effect of such a blog is to allow readers to get a strong sense of your personality and your work as a photographer. These are the kinds of blogs that family, friends, and fellow photo enthusiasts will enjoy reading as well as clients. But a real advantage is that the blog allows clients to get a feel for what kind of person you are and whether your personality and style fits with what they want.

Depending on how open you are about sharing your own personality, some people use blogs essentially like diaries, just to tell their personal stories. If you think no one is interested in your personal ponderings, think again. It’s always surprising to me that people are interested in reading the personal diaries of others, but they are. People seem to be voyeuristic by nature.

If you are reading this, then you aspire to be a professional photographer. How many other people in the world do you think aspire to be professional photographers? A lot! We often consider that to be a bad thing, because it means more competition. But from the perspective of a blogger, all these people are your compatriots, interested in the same things and engaged in the same struggles. There’s a good chance that many would be interested in reading about your personal journey.

Blogs oriented toward fellow photographers

For this kind of blog, you find a photography-related subject that you have (or can get) special knowledge or insight about. You share that information with other photographers. And if it’s valuable enough, they will come. This blog is a good example, as are two other groups blogs that I run, Photocrati and SLR Geek.

Many people think they don’t know enough about anything interesting to write their own blog. Think again. You know more than you think you do, and you DO have some special knowledge that would be valuable for others. Good possibilities might include the best photography locations in your town, including the best places for landscape shots or wedding photos or some other kind of photography. You might talk about the techniques you’ve used to produce your favorite shots. Or the best camera stores in your town. Or the problems you’ve had with photoshop and how you’ve solved them. Or the best photography books you’ve read.

One adaptation of this kind of blog is to collect existing online advice and to provide an intuitively organized clearinghouse of information on certain subjects. The web universe is so vast that it can take hours of searching to find the right resources, and even then you often don’t find the best ones. If you can find the best resources for others, you can save them time and provide a valuable service.

Another adaptation for the truly enterprising is to expand your blog beyond yourself. You can invite others who know as much (or perhaps more) than you on particular subjects to contribute to your blog. Some blogs are based entirely on this model, providing a forum for many bloggers to post their thoughts on a given subject.

To make all of this more concrete, consider an example. Let’s say you enjoy doing macro and super-close up photography. In addition to showcasing your own imagery on your site, you could collect and organize the most valuable information on the web for close-up photography—locations, techniques, equipment. You could also find other great close up photographers, local or national depending on your ambitions, and get them to post on your site. Now your site is becoming a focal point for the community of photographers who do close-up work. From there you can keep expanding. The additional content not only generates traffic, and therefore opportunities for revenue, but also solidifies your reputation as a close-up photographer.

You can do the same thing if you specialize in weddings, cultural photography in Jordan, wildlife in Kentucky, or extreme sports.

Starting Your Blog

Blogs are remarkably easy to start. The simplest approach is to go to WordPress (www.wordpress.com) or Blogspot (www.blogspot.com) and simply follow the instructions to get started. Your blog can be up an running in minutes, free of charge. They will give you a site address like janesmith.wordress.com to host your blog, and you can just add a link to that address from you photography website. Even those lacking tech savvy will find setting up a blog to be a relatively easy process.

If you want to have the blog based directly on your site (ie. www.janesmith.com), I would suggest downloading and installing WordPress software directly to the server where you site is hosted. While this may sound complicated, it’s not. If you have set your site up yourself, including setting up your domain name and hosting service, then you can simply call your hosting service and ask them for instructions. Most webhosting services have a simple, “one-click” option for installing WordPress on your site that greatly simplifies the process.

Indeed, if you are still waiting to set up your site, you can go to bluehost.com now, use the check domain link to find a web address you like (www.janesmith.com), and then call Bluehost to set up your site and install WordPress at the same time. You can have the whole thing up and running in 15-20 minutes.

Blog as Business Activity

I’ve already noted some of direct benefits of runnig a blog: it solidifies your reputation as an expert in the kind of photography you do, it shows readers your personality, and (due to both of the previous) it helps you attract and keep clients.

If you are enterprising enough, however, you can make your blog a source of income in it’s own right. I’ve written in another article about the importance of Multiple Streams of Photography Income. I honestly believe that most photographers, especially those starting out, need to think beyond the simple take-photos-and-get-paid-for-it model of the photography business. Most pros do a range of income earning activities beyond photography – from writting magazine articles or books to conducting workshops to providing photo editing services to other photographers.

In this spirit, a well-done blog can be its own business activity. Once your blog develops a decent readership, it’s quite feasible that you can bring in an additional $1000/month from a blog. This article is not the place to go into great detail about how to “monetize” a blog. I’ll be clear in saying that you need to do this carefully. Many a blog has been ruined by excessive emphasis on income. But it can be done right, with taste, grace, and a continued emphasis on providing a enjoyable experience for your readers.

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Have a blog? What you think about the role of blogging in photography?

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Note: Photocrati has just released an outstanding set of WordPress-based photography website templates. Unlike most solutions I’ve looked at in this series, they combine both gallery management and blogging in one package. I may be biased, since I’m involved with Photocrati, but I think they’re an awesome solution.

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While I’ve done weddings and portraits in the past to supplement income from my other photographic work, I recently entered the waters of wedding and portrait photography more thoroughly. As part of the new venture, I needed a new website dedicated exclusively to wedding and portrait photography.

These days, there are tons of great website templates and pro storefronts available to photographers: Printroom, Smugmug, BetterPhoto, ifp3, Snapfish, Foliolink, and others. Although all of these solutions have limitations, they also offer some great websites. Unless you’re a web guru or have lots of money to burn, there’s really no reason to build a site from scratch.

In the past, and in my more recent search, I’ve examined or tested a wide range of photo website templates. There are almost no genuine reviews of what’s out there, and the information provided by the sites themselves is obvious biased and limited, so you often have to actually buy and test a templates to really see if it’s the right fit.

The aim of this series is give photographers a better and more systematic basis for choosing their web template. So over the next couple of months, I’m going to write reviews of all the major web template providers. Here’s the list of site providers you’ll hear about over the next two months:

BetterPhoto
Big Black Bag
Foliolink
ifp3
Photobiz
PortfolioSiteZ
Printroom
SiteWelder
SmugMug
Snapfish
Wordpress Templates (from various providers)

I’ll also prepare a article with a round-up review of general template sites like Template Monster, Entheos, and Flash Mint. These are huge template shops that provide photography templates along with many, many others. While they have nice looking templates, they generally don’t anticipate photographers’ needs as well as sites dedicated to photographers.

That’s still an incomplete list, and I’ll add additional sites as I find them. If you know of good quality photography template providers, please let me know in the comments.

In order to be systematic and provide a basis for effective comparison, we’ll be looking each of the following aspects, which reflect some of the features I think are important for today’s photographers.

OVERALL APPEARANCE
FLEXIBILITY OF DESIGN
BLOGGING CAPABILITY
E-COMMERCE FUNCTIONALITY
COST AND FEE STRUCTURE
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
FREE TRIALS AND GUARANTEES
CONCLUSION (INCLUDING PROS AND CONS)

I’ll provide screen shots of sample websites and links to demos built from the templates as well as screen shots of the back end management system so you’ll know what you’re really getting into.

The first review will cover Photobiz, which is the provider I ultimately chose for a new wedding and portrait site. While I like the look, Photobiz also come with important limitations that I’m just now encountering. Look for the first review by early next week.

UPDATE: I’ve since switched my sites to PHOTOCRATI. It’s based on WordPress, which is the fastest growing platform for websites, build for blogging, and among the most SEO friendly platforms.

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In the process of starting SLR Geek, I collected a long list of SLR and PHOTOGRAPHY domain names. Despite the fact that some of them are competitive with SLR Geek and here with DSLRBlog, I don’t want to sit or squat on them, so I’ve put them up for sale, here and on SEDO. Here is a list of all the domain names currently for sale, along with the prices. Note that prices on SEDO are higher due to fees charged by SEDO on any sale. So you’d be better to buy them directly from me.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me at erick@erickdanzer.com.

DOMAIN NAMES

$349

www.slrreport.com
www.slrblogger.com
www.slrbuzz.com
www.slrspot.com
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www.bestslrs.com
www.photographymonster.com
www.freelancefieldguide.com
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$99

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www.slrspace.net
www.slrspot.net
www.slrstuff.net
www.slrsupermarket.net
www.slruniverse.net
www.slrwarehouse.net

$49

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www.slr-blogger.net
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www.thedigitalslr.net
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www.digitalslrblog.net
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www.theslraddict.net
www.theslrenthusiast.net
www.theslrguru.net
www.theslrpro.net
www.theslrreview.net
www.theslrstore.net

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If you have ever wanted to know more info about your Flickr traffic, who looks at what, and where your views come from, the Flickr has the feature for you!

We’ve designed stats on Flickr to give you all sorts of insight into how people arrive at your photos.

The stats are updated daily and include referrers from other sites and search engines, including search queries, individual photo views within the site, but nicely it does NOT include your own clicks which could skew results.

You need to be a pro user to get this feature, plus after activating you need to wait a while to actually see some statistics.

Visit Flickr now to activate your stats or read more at the FAQ.

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