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Don Riddle is a photographer/videographer specializing in advertising photography and image capture for the travel and hospitality industry. Some of his clients include Four Seasons Resorts and Hotels, Ritz Carlton Resorts and Hotels, Rosewood Hotels, Marriott International, and Hyatt Hotels. To see more of his work, visit his liveBooks8 website: www.donriddle.com.

While studying to be an accountant, I enrolled in a photography class at the University of Utah. I instantly fell in love with photography and decided that life as an accountant might not be for me. I moved back to Southern California and enrolled in Brooks Institute of Photography. This started me on a path to a 20 year career of creating images.

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

DR: Clean, simple and large! I love the full-page images.

Q: How often do you typically update your website?

DR: I try to update my website every 6 months rotating in newer images from recent projects.

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

DR: Homepage images need to be impactful and current. I try to keep some of my most inspiring and new images right there in front.

Q: What is your favorite feature of liveBooks8?

DR: The ease of design. I liked the ability to start out with a blank slate and customize the site to my liking. It didn’t take long to learn how the design software worked. That was a big selling point for me.

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

DR: Ease of use for the viewer! I think it is very important that art buyers viewing a site can easily navigate the site. I will quickly leave a site that is too confusing to figure out. You don’t want to give anyone an excuse to move on to the next site. It needs to be instantly apparent how to navigate through the site.

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

Chuck Haney is a professional freelance photographer/writer based in beautiful Whitefish, Montana. He travels extensively across the United States and Canada in pursuit of the finest and most intriguing images. His provocative use of natural light in landscape, wildlife, and outdoor sports images have drawn national acclaim and have landed him many assignments including advertising campaigns.

Chuck’s finest images grace the walls of many residential and public spaces. His travel and outdoor lifestyle articles have been featured in numerous national and regional publications; adding to 13 coffee table books, over 190 magazine covers, and numerous sole-photographer calendars to his credit. Chuck enjoys teaching a series of popular photography workshops across the country each year. To view more of Chuck’s work, please visit his liveBooks website: www.chuckhaney.com. Follow Chuck on Facebook and Instagram!

My career in landscape photography began gradually. I would go for bicycling excursions in nearby Glacier National Park and see all these wonderful scenes unfold before my eyes. Soon, I was returning with my SLR camera in tow. This was in the early 1990s when I learned to shoot with film and manual settings.

For me, a perfect landscape image is one that places the viewer into the scene by using a wide angle lens and lots of depth of field. The best shots have fleeting magical light that happens briefly during stormy weather patterns and invoke an emotion. It’s also important to carry the correct equipment. I, for one, cannot leave my home without a sturdy tripod. I always mention to my workshop students that a good tripod is your friend for life.

As for my projects – there is no single one that I can choose as my favorite. Actually, whatever I’m working on at the time is my favorite project. The scope of my portfolio is wide and vast and I enjoy the fact that I work on such a variety of subject matter. One week I am shooting city images for my new book, “Portrait of San Francisco” and the next week I find myself searching for interesting barns for stock use in calendars.

I shoot at a wealth of interesting places; my favorites vary based on the time of the year. I love shooting in the deserts in Spring, the Great Plains in early Summer, hardwood forests of the Midwest in Fall and ski action or quite winter scenes near my hometown of Whitefish, Montana.

I am passionate about my craft. I think this is well-represented in my Portfolios pages on liveBooks, which highlight my favorite and most popular images. I think a photographer does best when he/she shoots subjects that they enjoy…You can tell that I have a zest for many subjects!

One piece of advice that I can give to fellow landscape photographers is to get to know your location by being patient and to take a closer look at what is really around you. You will discover a whole new world that could easily just slip by without careful consideration and reflection.

Want to be featured as one of our guest bloggers? Email us at social@livebooks.com!

We are excited to introduce Balint to you today! He is one of our outstanding support specialists and has been with the liveBooks team for five years. He loves the community and the opportunity to interact with people with different mentalities. He can be frequently found playing on his computer or reading. Fun fact – you can always pick Balint out in a crowd because he is actually really tall!

Quick Facts:
Hometown: Brasov, Romania
Favorite liveBooks8 Feature: The editor itself and everything it includes. It is so easy to use, the learning curve is minimal and there is so much freedom in customization!
Favorite TV Show: Family Guy
Pets: Kazimir (his lovable fish!)
You will never see Balint without….: Headphones

Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is one of the most important features that your website can have. SEO is the ability for online search engines to recognize your site through proper indexing. With a sound SEO strategy, you will be able to organically drive customers to your business, based on keywords and common search terms.

The liveBooks8 platform allows you the ability to add SEO settings on an image/page level as well as site-wide level. This article will focus on the setting for page level SEO settings. To begin adding SEO settings to your pages, see below:

1. From the Content tab, enter your page by clicking its title
2. On the righthand sidebar, select SEO and dropdown the settings
3. You will notice 5 input boxes: Title Tag, Description, Keywords, Navigation Label, and Canonical URL.

• Title Tags: the title of the page that you see in your tab of the browser
• Description Tag: a concise explanation of the content of your web page for search engines to crawl through
• Keywords: keywords relevant to your business to be crawled and catalogues by search engines (separate keywords with commas)
• Navigation Label: set a different title/label for the navigation menu on your site
  • For example, yoursite.com/about-us can be changed to yoursite.com/abouttheteam
• Canonical URL: helps prevent duplicate content from being indexed
  • If someone tries to copy the information you have on your website to theirs, search engines will recognize you as the primary owner of the content!
• The first toggle option will allow search engines to index your site and display it in search results (we recommend always having it on!)
• The second toggle option will allow search engines to follow links and index them as well (we recommend always having it on as well!)

4. Select Publish and you are finished!

Is there a new liveBooks feature that you are excited to learn more about? Let us know at social@livebooks.com.