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Jessica Punter is a freelance fashion stylist, grooming journalist, brand consultant and copy writer with over 15 years experience, specializing in the menswear industry. Her first break was in 2001, an internship at a magazine called FHM Collections, which was a spin-off fashion title to FHM, the biggest selling men’s magazine in the UK at the time. From there she worked her way up from Fashion Assistant to Fashion Director. She joined British GQ in 2011 and was there until she went freelance last Autumn.

In addition to styling many celebrities she has also interviewed some of the world’s most famous sporting personalities, actors, musicians and designers including David Beckham, Justin Timberlake and Tom Ford.

James Franco by Nick Wilson

Q&A with Jessica Punter

Q1. How would you describe the aesthetic of your website in three words?

JP: Clean, clear, simple.

Q2: How often do you typically update your website?

JP: Usually once a season when I have fresh editorials to upload.

Josh White House by Brock Elbank

Q3:. How do you choose the photos that you display on your homepage?

JP: I go with my personal favorites plus a selection to show the breadth of my work: that I can do celebrity, sportswear, formal tailoring and that I cast diverse models and work with great set designers.

Ansel Elgort and Dane DeHaan by Christian Oita

Q4: What is your favorite feature of liveBooks?

JP: With my previous website I was limited to just a single image for my home page. Now have a landing/home page that uses multiple images and gives potential clients an instant overview.

Q5: What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to someone designing their website?

JP: It’s so much easier to design it than it looks.

Michael Caine by Greg Williams

Search engine optimization (also known as SEO) is a long-term process that can help your website show up higher on search results. Ranking on the first page of Google never happens overnight, but it’s better to start trying sooner rather than later.

If you are just starting out and not sure which steps to take to begin optimizing your website, here are some simple steps you can take to begin the process:

Generate More Content

Having several pages that describe your services, products and company history is great. But in order to rank highly, you’ll need to start publishing more content on a regular basis.

Building an online blog is one of the easiest ways to boost your SEO. Why? Because it tells search engines like Google that you are actively engaging in the online conversation surrounding your industry. Blogging also provides additional content, keywords, images and more for search engine’s to search through.

Companies that publish relevant, informative content online will rank higher on search engines. If you aren’t one of them, you will lose out to those that do.

If you struggle with creating content on a regular basis, consider setting aside one day a month to schedule content out in advance. Or hire a freelancer to help you!

Add More Keywords to Your Website

Although you never want to make it sound like a computer wrote your website, you may want to review the current web pages you have to ensure you’re including the right keywords to begin with.

While you read the content you already have up, keep your eyes peeled for keywords you know your potential audience may use on search engines to find you.

If you already have a large following and great brand awareness, make sure you have your company name listed in an appropriate amount of places. If you are a fairly unknown company, but have specific services or products others may search for, it’s vital that you begin listing out those services in detail.

One great way to see what phrases people commonly use surrounding your business or industry is to begin typing in keywords on Google. As you type, you’ll see related phrases and common search queries come up underneath the search bar. You’ll also find an area of “related” search terms at the bottom of your results list. Use these keywords and phrases (also known as long-tail keywords) in your website copy when it sounds appropriate.

Drive More Traffic

Whether you are regularly engaged on social media, or you’ve started a great email list of contacts who want to stay in-the-know about your company, find ways to drive free traffic to your website.

The more traffic you bring to your website, the more that search engines will see you as a relevant source of information. When that happens, your ranking starts to increase over time. It’s a great way to connect all of your marketing efforts and easily begin boosting your SEO — for free!

Improve Your Web Design

liveBooks offers stunning, customizable website templates for wedding industry professionals and creatives.

Impress your potential clients with a visually stunning website that is ready for search engines and looks great on any mobile device!

We’ve also got a top-notch support team who’s here to help you every step of the way. Start for free today!

Cassandra Plavoukos was born and raised in southern New Jersey. Her interest in photography started in grade school and continued throughout high school, shooting film back then. When she graduated, she moved to New York City to pursue a career in the business side of fashion, as she didn’t think that a career in photography was possible at that time. Cassandra lived and worked in New York City for 16 years.

Cassandra Plavoukos continued taking pictures, and was shooting digitally by this time. She relocated to Los Angeles in 2003 and continued working in the fashion industry, taking pictures on the weekends to fulfill my creative passion.

Then, her first child was born in 2005. Instead of a traditional “baby book”, she self-published a book of poems entitled, When You Grow Up, which expressed her hopes and dreams for his childhood and beyond. She illustrated the book with images that she had taken of his first-year milestones. The images were taken with a point and shoot camera. The book was successful among family and friends and was sold online as well. The book was also accepted into a book fair. To celebrate, her husband bought me my first DSLR, a Nikon D90, and encouraged her to continue shooting. With a new camera, she knew she had to up her game.

Cassandra Plavoukos began to really look at her images with a critical eye. She knew she could do better. Her mentality shifted. She began to focus on “making” pictures instead of “taking” them. She started looking for photography classes to learn more about photography and landed at UCLA extension where an instructor by the name of Josh Sanseri encouraged and inspired her even further.

After completing the Environmental Portraiture class there, she wanted more intense study, and enrolled in the certificate of photography program at Santa Monica College. After completing that program, she started taking classes at Julia Dean, which is now the Los Angeles Center Of Photography. Her daughter was born in 2009 and knew by then that photography was something she wanted to pursue full time. She decided to leave the fashion industry. Then, she incorporated Cassandra Plavoukos Photography, got a liveBooks website, business license, tax registration, and never looked back!

Cassandra Plavoukos now focuses on dance, athletic, fine art fitness and creative portraiture and couldn’t be happier doing what she loves.

Q&A with Cassandra Plavoukos

Q1: How would you describe the aesthetic of your website in three words?

CP: Clean. Modern. Minimalistic.

Q2.How often do you typically update your website?

CP: Once or twice per month.

Q3. How do you choose the photos that you display on your homepage?

CP: I try to showcase the most recently commissioned or self-assigned work to highlight on my homepage. Keeping in mind the overall aesthetics of the site, I consider not only how the images will sit together, but how they will work together to give the best “overview” of the contents within.

Q4. What is your favorite new feature of liveBooks?

CP: Hard to choose! I love the drag and drop design as well as the varied portfolio views, but because I update my site so often, I think I would have to say the site wide styling and page-level styling features.

Q5.What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to someone designing their website?

CP: Let liveBooks do it for you! But know who you are as an artist and what defines your work. This will help you to work with them to create the best website possible.

It’s easy to build your liveBooks website from scratch by yourself; it’s also quite possible that some things will be left out. We want to make sure that all your parameters are properly filled, so that you won’t have any technical hiccups down the line. Here’s a list of five liveBooks features and why they’re so important for your website building process.

1. Canonical URLs

In your liveBooks content editor each page has its own presence, with specific content and design, but the search engines might not see it that way. In fact, when the “crawlers” go through your website and index it, they might get confused and see some pages as duplicates – a nuisance, especially when you spend so much time make each of your pages unique.

The fix: Go through each of your pages or items and open the SEO and Sharing dropdown. Make sure the Title tag and the Canonical URL fields read the same info. Do this for every page and search engines will never again get confused. Remember to do this every time you add a new page or item.

2. Search Engine Optimization

We’ve covered the importance of SEO, so go ahead and check that out for a comprehensive guide through your liveBooks SEO Everything™ feature. You’ll find all the info you need on the three main pillars of proper SEO in a liveBooks website:

• Overall website SEO
• Page SEO
• Image SEO

3. Image Size

All we want is for your clients to see your photographs and services in great quality and for them to show and load as fast as possible. To ensure that visitors, humans and bots, won’t leave your site due to slow loading time, resize your photos accordingly.

The fix: Photographs don’t need to be more than 72 dpi (dots per inch) for digital purposes. Most photographs, however, start around 300 dpi, causing them to be bigger in size (bytes). Ideally, images should be around 200-800 KB maximum each. We’ve covered this subject in greater detail here, so make sure you check it out!

4. Legacy URLs

This applies only to those who have migrated their old site to our liveBooks platform and ensures that their old links redirect to their new website. This is helpful with both search engine bots that are now able to find your new website, and to clients who bookmarked pages from your previous online presence.

The fix: Go to Settings – Legacy URLs. Copy all links from your old website and redirect them to your new pages. Do this for all pages! If the old link doesn’t correspond to either of your new pages, add the redirects to the homepage.

5. Responsive Design Review

This aspect is something that can easily be overlooked, but with great consequences on the mobile experience. Our platform features are all responsive and designed to look great on all devices. Still, editable factors such as padding or page and gallery names can sometimes interfere with the smooth design we create in every template. So when you build your website yourself, double-check that all pages look sharp. Just go in the design editor and toggle between all the devices.

If you have any other questions, remember that our award-winning support team is ready and happy to help! Good luck and have fun creating your new liveBooks website!