livebooks blog

Photographer David Wilder dabbled in portrait, wedding, and commercial photography before he landed on his true calling – photographing the great outdoors. Now, David spends his time capturing the beautiful Alberta landscape and exploring around the world. His website is a true reflection of his love for nature – and reflects a clean and crisp look that we are so excited to feature this week.

Check out his full site – www.davidwilder.ca – and read on for what he had to say about his site’s creation!

Q: How would you describe the aesthetic of your website in three words?

DW: Clean, Simple, Sleek. For someone like myself who is always about presenting my work with less distractions, that’s what drew my attention to this design.

Q: How do you choose the photos that you display on your homepage?

DW: I was always taught that your handshake says a lot about you. My homepage is my handshake, it is often the first thing people see and where they start to learn about me. I choose images for the homepage that speak to my character, what I value, and who I am as a person. It is with these images the visitor can become captivated and drive them to want to see more.

Q: How often do you update your website?

DW: The most challenging thing for any creative is to stay current and relevant. Before I found liveBooks, it was so hard to keep updating my site. But with liveBooks the system is now so easy to make changes on the fly. I tend to make updates to my website once a month. I feel it gives a balance between my visitors getting a chance to see what I have recently been working on but not rush their favorite images out the door too soon.

Q: What is your favorite feature that liveBooks offers?

DW: Hands down it is the Admin Portal. Time is so important to everyone. The less time I have to dedicate to making changes means the more time I can focus on my craft. My heart always wants to be behind the camera taking the next photograph and the way the Admin Portal makes updating my site so efficient it allows me to be out there finding my next shot.

Q: What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to someone who is designing their website?

DW: My advice would be design something that speaks to you, as this will achieve a number of things. A website speaks on your behalf, it represents you. You want visitors to get to know you by viewing it and feel like they have already met you. You also want to be happy with its aesthetics; it needs to be captivating and engaging to your audience, otherwise you will constantly be trying to change it and using up precious time that you could be using to create more of your art.

Follow more of David’s work and adventures on Instagram – @dw_photo_ca

Have a website you’d like us to feature? Email us at social@livebooks.com.

Emmy-award winning destination wedding photographers Chris+Lynn travel all over the world taking gorgeous, colorful, and highly expressive images. Their website is so unique and romantic that we absolutely had to feature it this week.

Check out their full site – www.chrispluslynn.com because we absolutely love it – and we’re sure you will too!

Q: How would you describe the aesthetic of your website in three words?

C+L: Emotive, bold, and handcrafted.

Q: How do you choose the photos that you display on your homepage?

C+L: Our clients are couples headed on the literal and emotional journey of having a destination wedding, so our photography is about capturing that – the true adventure of love! We choose images that reflect the authenticity of travel, adventure, and love.

Q: How often do you update your website?

C+L: We try to update galleries with fresh images every two months.

Q: What is your favorite feature that liveBooks offers?

C+L: The ease of updating in the editSuite is great and we love the incredible customer service.

Q: What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to someone who is designing their website?

C+L: For us, designing a website is a constant work in progress! Understanding this and having a platform where you can continually and easily update and tweak the site is important. Another tip we found valuable was to aim for maximum impact when choosing your images – and design your site to heighten that impact.

Keep up with their destination weddings and adventures on Instagram @chrispluslynn & Twitter @chrispluslynn.

Have a website you’d like us to feature? Emails us at social@livebooks.com!

We feel extremely lucky here at liveBooks to have so many talented photographers and creative professionals from all over the world using our platform. Lukasz Warzecha, a Polish born British photographer, does incredible photo and video work on mountaineering in some amazing locations. This week we are featuring his website (we love his integration of both photo and video!) Check out what he had to say about it below!

Q: How would you describe the aesthetic of your website in three words?

LW: Uncluttered, Modern, Fresh

Q: How do you choose the photos that display on your homepage?

LW: This has been a long process. I’ve been shooting professionally for over five years now and over this period of time I had opportunities to shoot on four continents and for a variety of clients. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Peter Dennen, Former Director of Photography at Aurora Photos and now running his own consultancy business (Pedro+Jackie). Peter has poured over 1000+ images and organized my work into galleries, the whole process took us a few months also because I’m normally super busy traveling and shooting.

Q: How often do you update your website?

LW: I try to update my page every 12-18 months, in between I’m usually adding some fresh images every now and again.

Q: What is your favorite feature that liveBooks offers?

LW: I’ve been a liveBooks customer for a long time now (four years, I think?!) and I just like the whole system. The look and feel of the galleries and the integrated video capability and the back end, plus email and FTP support.

See Lukasz’s full site here: www.lwimages.co.uk

Have a website you’d like us to feature? Email us at social@livebooks.com!

The importance of having a mobile-friendly website for a photographer or creative should not come as a surprise. The percentage of mobile traffic has surpassed 50% on many sites, and Google (as they are known to do) is once again switching up their algorithm to cater to this growing number.

On Tuesday, April 21st, Google will start using mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This means that Google will now start marking your site as mobile-friendly (seen in screenshots below) to determine if your site should rank higher in search results. To put it simply, if your website or blog is not mobile-friendly, it will be penalized by Google when a user is doing a search on a mobile device. Google says that it is doing this so that “users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.”

What does this mean for you and your liveBooks site?

To ensure that your site is not negatively affected by this new change when someone searches using a mobile device, it is important that you make sure Mobile 2.0 is enabled in your editSuite. Mobile 2.0 was built with this new algorithm in mind to optimize your mobile presence. It will transform your liveBooks site into a clean, easy-to-navigate, photo-centric experience for all users on all types of mobile devices.

You will also want to check out Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to confirm the compatibility of your site and blog.

Additional Resources:

editSuite Help – Enabling Mobile Websites

Mobile Websites 2.0 FAQ

Google’s Mobile Guidelines

Google Webmaster Help Forum

5 Benefits of Mobile Websites

Need help enabling Mobile 2.0 in your editSuite? Contact our support team at support@livebooks.com