livebooks blog

Your website is the online extension of your brand, and as such, it should follow the same visual guidelines as your entire business. While your logo is your own trademark that distinguishes your brand from your competitors, it alone does not tell your business’ story, its values nor does it depict the entire picture.

The tone of your business voice is an important aspect of how your market relates to you. Your marketing campaigns and how you choose to run them are indicative of your business’ core values. The fonts you use when addressing these messages can become trademarks of your brand. And the colors – think about the Coca-Cola red – not only is it unique, it’s also recognized by millions of people all around the world.

Colors matter when you create your brand, just as much as they do when they accompany your services and products. It is the fastest way to create a connection between your brand and your audience. This precise reason is why the liveBooks website templates can be customized beyond their initial state.

Let’s focus on adding borders to the images you upload on your website. These borders are a great tool to use that give each image its own presence on your website. They can be white and thin, which goes well with any website that has a color background, they can be colorful and bold, or anywhere in between.

There are two ways you can go about to adding borders to your images.

1. Sitewide borders – In your design editor go to Sitewide – Images. Enable Show borders and define their color, opacity and width. This will add borders to all images on your website. 
2. Gallery borders – In the design editor go to the page with the gallery or image you want to customize. Scroll down to the image settings and enable borders.

If you added site-wide borders and want to disable them on specific pages, you can do so by following the second set of commands. When you’re happy with the result, publish your page and the changes will instantly become visible.

When changing your colors you have to make sure you’re picking the right one. Going solely on visual similarity does not guarantee you’ve made the right choice and you need consistency in your brand. One reason you might not pick the right color is your monitor’s colors: sometimes it’s calibrated and it shows the precise colors you need, but most often it’s not.

That’s why you need to check the HEX code of your brand colors and add it when using the design editor. If you know the name of your color, you can find its HEX code here. In our design editor you can either use the HEX code, or the RGB (red-green-blue) inputs for your colors.

So what are you waiting for? Give this feature a try! Remember, you can always save your design before making drastic changes to your website, so your work is always safe.

Don’t have a website yet? We offer a two week free trial for all our websites, so you can play around our editors and create the perfect website for your business.

If you are trying to grow a profitable photography business, chances are you already know how important a strong website is for long-term success. And while you may have a great eye for composing and editing beautiful images, you may not have the right level of expertise to know what does and doesn’t make a great website.

As you work on your new website’s design, be sure to avoid these common mistakes made by photographers on the web today.

Too Little Content

Even if you have some of the most stunning photographs and would prefer to let them do most of the selling for you online, it doesn’t mean you should rely too heavily on only letting them do the talking. Content is still a vitally important piece to your website’s user experience!

Not only do people who visit your website want to know what you offer, but they ideally want to have enough information to connect with you personally before even reaching out to you through your contact form. You’ll also reap the benefits of higher search engine rankings with a strategic content strategy as well.

Too Many Images

As the artist, you probably have a similar challenge to most other artists out there: you have a personal love for all of your work. Although that is completely understandable, it doesn’t mean every image you’ve ever taken deserves to be front-and-center on your website.

Whether you ask friends and family (or other experienced photographers) to help you, or you practice being a little more critical of your own work, it’s extremely beneficial to narrow down to the best of the best before putting them online.

Why? For a couple of great reasons. First, you should make sure that the work you publish online depicts your best and most relevant work that speaks to your brand and ideal clients. Secondly, too many images (especially with large file sizes that aren’t optimized) can slow down your site load speed, preventing users from enjoying your site while also harming your SEO.

Lack of Contact Information

You also want to make sure your contact information is easily accessible across your website. Far too many photographers make the mistake of linking to social media handles and a contact page, but forget to list a phone number or email address. Be sure that anyone who comes across your website and is interested in hiring you for your photography skills can actually contact you.

Start Your New Website Design Today

With a liveBooks website, you’ll be able to use our stunning, customizable website templates that look 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!

Your website and social media work hand in hand. The two are both pieces of your brand identity and should communicate the overall message you want your audience to receive.

Before you launch your next social media campaign, make sure your website is looking its best in order to achieve successful results.

Your website is the base of your digital strategy

No matter what kind of campaign you’re running on social media, the call-to-action will likely lead to your website. Your business’s website is the foundation for the rest of your digital strategy.

In other words, everything you produce online will direct users to your website. This means that once potential clients or customers land on your website after seeing your social media campaign, it needs to provide all of the information and content they’re looking for.

You could have created the most well-designed, attention-grabbing campaign, but if your website falls flat once users visit it, then the campaign likely won’t yield the results you’re hoping for.

Good content

If you create social media content that draws people in and builds a loyal following, your website should match that. Your audience may love your content on Facebook or Instagram, and they’ll likely head to your website to see what other content you have.

This is where having a great website will be important. The content you produce through your social media campaigns should be the same or similar to the content that’s on your website.

If your audience enjoys the content they’re seeing on social media, they will visit your website to see more. Make sure that your website is delivering on the content that your audience will want to see.

Builds customer loyalty

If you’re trying to grow your audience through your next social media campaign, having a strong website can help. Your website is another opportunity to show your audience who you are and what your business is all about. After launching your campaign, users will visit your website to learn more about your brand which is your chance to further emphasize the message you communicated through social media.

Having this cohesiveness across both channels will build customer loyalty as it ties the brand together. If potential clients or customers follow you on social media, they will have already formed an impression of your brand (hopefully it’s the message you’re trying to communicate!).

And because social media is an extension of your overall brand, including your website, customers will be happy to see that your website gives them the same impression as your social media. Being able to see a strong brand identity across the board will give customers a better idea of who your business is and they will want to stick around to see what you do next.

Start Designing Your Website Today!

If you already know your website isn’t a strong reflection of your brand and isn’t yet ready for those social media campaigns, consider using liveBooks to get started!

liveBooks offers mobile-responsive, customizable website templates for creative professionals and businesses worldwide.

The best part? Our website designs are ready for search engines and look 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 here.

There are many reasons to use PDF files on your site. PDFs can be used for content that you’d like to allows customers to download and/or print. PDFs also provide you with an easier way to display you licences, diplomas or other certificates that set our clients apart from the norm. Don’t forget to keep SEO in mind – check out best practices for optimizing PDFs from the Search Engine Journal.

Here’s an easy guide on how to add PDFs to any liveBooks site:

1. First, you need to upload the PDFs. Go to any page and add a Resource block.

2. Add the PDFs from your computer to the Resource block. This will automatically save them in the Resource Library.

3. Now that your PDFs are uploaded, you must add links to them on your website. Switch to the Design editor and go to the page you’ve been working on. The PDFs will appear all in one column. You can leave them as they are, or you can link them to Buttons, Text or Images.

To link PDFs to your media you will need to:

A. Open the PDF in a new tab and copy its address.

B. Go to your Content editor and add the way you want to link to that PDF. In our example we’ve used a button. Paste the link address in the top field and add a title that will be written on the button. (Note! The default setting opens links in the same tab. We recommend having your links and PDFs open in a separate tab. To enable this just press the button situated at the right end of the link; it will turn blue.)

C. Delete the PDF you’ve linked to the button and preview your page. Depending on the template you’ve chosen, your button may appear differently. Feel free to edit the appearance of your buttons in the Design Editor – Sitewide – Controls – Buttons.

Deleting a PDF from a page will not remove it from the website. To remove a PDF from your website go to your resource library and delete it from there.

Want to see more liveBooks features and how they can help your business grow? Start with a free trial today!