livebooks blog

We know that with the beginning of a fresh new year, many people get wrapped up in new projects and goals. Why not make one of them cleaning up your website?

Here are a few tips that will help get your website ready for a new year with a fresh start.

1. Update your image gallery: Sometimes you get caught up with work, whether it’s at photoshoots, editing images, creating editorials, and forget to update your website with the new images you’ve created. Updating your images is an important part of showcasing your work. This is especially important for your homepage. Now is a great time to look at your recent jobs and see which images would be best to showcase.
2. Check your links: It’s important to check your external and internal links continuously throughout the year. Links that don’t lead your audience anywhere create a poor user experience. They are less likely to go back to your website once this happens. It is especially important to check external links as other websites may change page names, website URLs, etc. Internal links are equally as important but are under your control. Check these every time you change a page name within your website.
3. Optimize your SEO: SEO is one of the most important aspects of your website! The liveBooks8 platform allows you to control SEO on a page/photo level as well as as on a site-wide level. It’s important that all of your SEO tags, descriptions and titles be up-to-date. Now is a great moment to look over these parts of your website. Still need some help understanding what SEO is and how you can optimize it on your website? Read here.
4. Remove any outdated information from your pages: As a new year begins, it brings the opportunity to showcase new works and events that you would like your clients to see and attend. Potential clients interested in attending your events and conferences could be lost if they see that you have not updated information for the 2018 year.
5. Update your website’s copyright footer: Your website’s copyright year will not automatically update. Make sure that if you have a copyright on your website and change the year from 2017 to 2018. This is especially important in the footer – the place where most people forget to look through.

These simple tips will make your website look both cleaner and more professional. As the new year begins, make sure to set aside some time to complete these tasks. They will make your website look both more professional and will help attract the right clients in 2018.

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!

Wondering how you can change the background on your website? This quick tutorial will help you get started! The liveBooks8 platform offers you the option to change your background on a site-wide or page by page level. The site-wide option will change the background on every page you have on your website. This will also affect any new page that is added onto the website.

If you would like to change the background on a single page or have different backgrounds throughout your website, the page level would be the best option for you.

Note that whether you choose to change your background on a site-wide or page by page level, you will be able to choose a solid color, a pattern, or upload a custom image.  If you decide to upload a custom background file, please adhere to our image sizing guide. This can be found by following this link.

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

Original Blog Post 10/2016.

The liveBooks8 website editor allows you to create a custom navigation bar that fits your website’s specific needs. Whether this includes a drop-down menu that organizes your portfolio galleries, the use of social media icons, or the use of links and buttons, you’ll be able to customize every aspect of the navigation bar. Check out the video tutorial below to get started!

Is there a new liveBooks8 feature that you are excited to learn more about? Let us know at social@livebooks.com!