livebooks blog

Design and layout consistency matter when presenting your work to your online audience. Whether they are new visitors checking out your portfolios or long established fans of your work, roaming around your website should feel like a cohesive experience. The unification of style, colors, visual elements and tone of voice in your writing are elements that define your brand, albeit a small part of it. Check out this article for more details on how to enhance your brand.

So how does duplicating a page help your brand? When you duplicate a page, you create an exact clone of it on your website. This means that all the structural elements and design specifications will be transferred over to your new page. So will all your content from the duplicated page; all you will have to do is replace the copies with your content of choice.

We encourage all clients to add features and experiment with all the design editor has to offer. In this respect, we find page duplication an important feature for all our clients, because when you’ve come to the ideal setup for your page, all that’s left is to duplicate it, fill in the content and publish your work.

We make page duplication sound very easy, and it is: right now you are four clicks away from creating a new page with the same structure. Before we start, make sure your targeted page is set to visible. You can change this setting back after you’ve duplicated it.

1. First click on your content editor to see the list of all your pages.
2. Select the gear icon on any page that you wish to duplicate.
3. In the black modal popup, select the blue Duplicate page link. 
4. Select the green Yes button when prompted. Your new page will appear right under the target page and it will have the same title. 

That’s it! Now all you have to do is change the content in your new page. These two pages are not synced, so should you make any structural or design changes in one, the other will remain the same.

Don’t have a website to try out this wonderful feature? You can sign up for a free trial today!

Darryl Anderson is a 26-year-old fashion and product stylist from New Orleans, LA. He started out at the age of 16 and has been fortunate enough to consistently work in his field. Darryl originally started off styling local fashion shows, but then moved away and started marketing himself as a stylist. Like any journey, he is constantly looking to grow and level up!

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

DA: My website is 3 words. Precise, Chic,Timeless.

Q2: How often do you typically update your website?

DA: I update my website often, usually as new work is released. You never know who is looking so I like to keep it fresh and inspiring!

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

DA: For my homepage I tried to choose a few images that represent the overall feel of my work taking some of my best images from each genre of my styling is usually the route I take. Showcasing all races is very important to me. I am stylist for the people!

Q4: What is your favorite feature of liveBooks?

DA: My favorite features would be just the overall customization the new font options and layouts are super nice definitely has a more professional feel!

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

DA: Keep it clean. I’ve had a website for about 7 years now and I’ve tried a ton of different varieties from music to loud colors. I would say based it around your business look at other sites that provide the same service you do just to get ideas. Over the years I have found simple is the best, keep it about the work with clear communication for your viewers on how to get in contact with you!

See more of Darryl Anderson’s work here: www.styledbydarryl.com

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.