livebooks blog

Happy National Password Day!

Today we’re celebrating National Password Day, a salute to our most important online data and the crypto-keys that guard it. The average business user has at least 191 Open Sesames for their online accounts and hidden treasures, a true testament of how much of our activity takes place online. This contemporary status quo is the medium in which we’ve added a new and exciting feature to our websites: the Password Protection feature for private galleries, pages and items.

Password Protection 101

As photographers, we understand that some of your commissioned work is not for the general public, but for your clients’ eyes only, and we respect that. We also feel that your brand should accompany all of your work, and since your liveBooks site is the extension of your business, we figured it should also be the place to host your private collections. The Password Protection feature allows you to share galleries, pages or items only with those whom you’ve given the password to. It’s meant to ease the access to your private work while ditching the third image upload parties for your own personal cyberspace.

How to enable Password Protection

Go to your content editor and click on any page, item or gallery you want to make private. On the right side of the page you’ll see the Password dropdown field. Tick the “Require password” module and set your preferred password. Remember, this is a key you will share with your clients, so use something generic and simple. And don’t worry if you forget it: every time you access the protected page in your content editor, your password will be visible to you. Now your gallery, while still on your website, can only be accessed with the right key.

• When the password protection feature is enabled on a page, a lock icon will appear next to its title in the content editor.
• Using Password Protection on your home page will lock the entire website.

Just private, not hidden

Any page or item can be protected by a password on your liveBooks site. They will appear on your menu, in your dropdowns, on your pages, keeping your website’s style and feel. When you try to access them, a pop-up will notify you that until you type what you’re supposed to type, you shall not pass!

Once your clients enter the protected area, they can roam around the portfolio for as long as they want. For security reasons, we’ve added an extra layer of idle and off-site security: if you refresh the page or navigate to another one, the session will automatically close after five minutes. Don’t worry, you can login again with the same password.

Your pop-up style

When you first enable your password protection feature, the pop-up you’ll get will be set in plain neutral colors. Of course, you can leave it as it is, but you can use your brand palette to give it your look. To do this, go to your design editor, in Sitewide choose Style and the Password Protection setting will be the bottom one.

Take some time to play around with the style settings, colors, sizes and backgrounds. When you’re happy with the result, save, publish and you’re done!

Password Protection is available on all packages, so no one is left out of this wonderful and useful feature. Don’t have an account to test this on yet?

Go ahead and sign up for a free trial today!

We wish you all a happy and safe National Password Day!

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!

If online visibility for your website is what you want, proper SEO is what you need

Your website is relevant, your portfolios are updated, your photography is flawless; so how come so few come to visit? It all comes down to that super popular fellow who only listens to bits of your story, but is excited to share all info it has on you to whomever will ask – the search engine.

Yes, it’s definitely your friend, as long as it gets to know you. Introducing SEO, the one thing every photography website owner knows they need, but not too many actually accommodate it. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the information laid out for the algorithms that skim through each published page, indexing them. They go from link to link and figure out what each website is about, how reliable it is and thus, how relevant it is for the online seeker.

According to what keywords you’ve used in the SEO fields, it will determine a ranking for your website. You already have a great photography website, but does the SEO formula agree? There are a few things you can do to put your foot in google search’s door and say “Alright, I’m here!”

It’s SEO Everything™ time!

The liveBooks websites are all about ease of access to your content, and SEO fits right in the whole scenario. It’s a platform used mainly by photography professionals, a career that stresses on the visual advantage over linguistics, which usually makes indexing a little harder, but we have many ways to go around that. It’s called SEO Everything and it truly is everything you need to get your photography website running at the speed of SEO. (There’s no such measurement unit, but we figure it’s fast. Superfast.)

First things first: check that your website will be indexed by search engines. This feature is automatically turned on, but we’ll go ahead and double-check just in case.

1. Go to settings, then click on the SEO tab.
2. While we’re here, let’s make sure that your website title and description are filled in. We’re determined to make the title visible for search engines, so our advice is to make it easy to read: business name + the keyword that describes your field of work (“Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” is a great example, even though we’re positive it wasn’t intentional). What you write in the description is up to you. This is the place where keywords are not important and it’s the only place where you don’t need to worry about google’s piercing scanners. The description appears under your website name in search results. (http://goo.gl/3HBg5R)
3. We can now proceed to the reason why we’re here: the first field in the search settings field. You want your website to be found, so the first option should be turned on. (http://goo.gl/cENHbu)
4. Finally, scroll down to the last field, Schema.org, and choose the appropriate organization type to be featured by this tool in indexing your website. (http://goo.gl/HkQJAU)

SEO for your pages

Now we’re ready to take on the great adventure of page and image SEO. This is an important journey to make, since we’re dealing with a photography website where written content is usually scarce. To give an overall perspective, the SEO algorithms behave best in a page containing around 600 words, so we’ll have to make up for it if you choose to let your photography do the talking without inserting text blocks to your galleries. Still, a few words are in order here, a few well written and descriptive words which will serve as your copy-paste material for the keywords field and will never again be seen on your website.

Before you move any further, get writing! Remember, capitalization is unimportant here, but spacing and spelling is. The recipe for a proper keyword sequence is keyword comma space keyword comma space and so on. (ex. wedding photography, engagement photography, ceremony photography in AZ, etc.)

In your content area click on a page and you’ll see a SEO & Settings dropdown field on the right side. This is where you stunning copy-paste skills will come in handy. Fill in these blocks with the keywords and description you’ve set. Do this for all pages. It’s tedious, we know, but you only do it once. Okay, you do it every time you create a new page or item, but trust us, it matters.

SEO for your photos

Now, we’ve said SEO Everything and we mean it! Don’t think we forgot the most important actors in your show: the photographs. In your image library click on the eye icon that appears when you hover over with your mouse and you’ll see a pop-up with the image info. We’ll focus on the first two fields: the title and the description. liveBooks allows google to index this info even if you choose not to show it on your website with the image info on hover option. This is a great feature that not all photography platforms can take pride in having, so we’re boosting over here.

1. Fill in the title first; it should be descriptive (sunset wedding on Cape cod, floral arrangement at reception, newly weds take wows, etc.).
   Notice how the examples we’ve given contain more words connected to your business, not just photography. That’s because as much as you want people to find you for their specific need, you also wouldn’t mind to have a prospective client bump into your work while googling for a flower arrangement and finding a great photographer to capture the spirit of their big event. and coming back to our buddy google and its power to validate your website, this is a great way to convince it that you are a proper professional who understands the entire ensemble of your work field.
2. The description, on the other hand, can differ from image to image and it is up to you to make it as detailed as you want to give an even bigger picture.

Extra tips

• You should have one website for your business so that google doesn’t get mislead
• If you’re doing a blog, use your website as the platform for it instead of an external page. Feel free to use outside links to projects.
• Keeping track of your ranking and optimal keywords is a must when reaching for a greater audience. The liveBooks professional plan includes real-time analytics, so you won’t have to bother with 3rd party tools.
• Changes won’t happen straight away, it takes time for the algorithms to find your updates and index them.

Spring is officially here – the time of year where we can start putting away our winter coats and boots and get excited for warm weather, sunshine, and being outside. Spring is also the time of year that allows us to take inventory of the old, polish it up, sweep it out, and dust it off. This same concept of “spring cleaning”  should apply to your business as well – and most importantly your website. When was the last time you really did an overhaul of your site? If it’s been awhile, now is the perfect time and we’ve compiled a list of things to focus on first to get you started!

Content Clean-Up

Make a conscious effort to do a truly comprehensive content clean up. This can range from something as simple as going through your portfolios and galleries and deleting older photos, adding new work, or moving images around, to actually digging in to your analytics and seeing which pages get the least amount of traffic and editing from there. Website design trends are moving toward cleaner, simplistic, and clutter-free – so really evaluate whether each page of your website is absolutely necessary and providing value to your audience.

Update Your Events Page

One of the things we see all too often is event pages that are far outdated – even by a few years. Take the opportunity to make sure your website is updated with your upcoming workshops, speaking engagements, photo expeditions, or any other important events you’re partaking in. Nothing looks more unprofessional than inaccurate information on your website – plus, this will be a great way to promote the events you care about and hopefully garner more attendees.

Calls to Action

One thing we’ve often noticed that’s missing from photography websites are clear calls to action. While most of the focus should be on your imagery, you also want to make sure you’re telling your audience what you want them to do. Whether that’s booking you for a job, project, ad campaign, or even buying prints, tell them what you’d like them to do and make it easy for them to do it. Having a button on your pages can be an ideal way to lead customers to your end-goal: contacting you!

Update Your Contact Information

If you’ve recently moved your studio or changed your contact phone number, it may be time to look over your contact page. Is your new contact information up-to-date? It can become easy to overlook this simple step, but doing so may cause you to lose a great deal of clients!

Also, try to have your contact information readily available in multiple locations on your website. Customers don’t want to search through countless pages to find your phone number or address. Remember – adding a map to your pages can be an ideal way to attract new customers!

 SEO Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should be something you focus on all year ’round, but if it’s not your strong suit definitely take the opportunity now to pay extra attention. If your goal is to increase traffic to your website (which we think it should be!) then make sure your keywords, tags, descriptions, titles, and content on your pages are working for your business. If you’re not ranking as high with search engines as you’d like, it might be time to overhaul your old SEO tactics and start fresh with these tips!

Experiment With New Website Designs

We know that completely changing your website design is a huge undertaking – but small, subtle changes can be made to create a fresh new look without all the stress of a total re-design. Switch up the images on your homepage. Change the names/titles of your portfolios. Add a new page – such as a blog – to your website. All of these changes will keep your website up to date, as well as give returning clients new things to look at and explore.

Want to explore other design templates? Take a look at all of our responsive templates now to begin!

What “spring cleaning” are you conducting on your website? Email us!