268: Alex Vita – Everything you need for a successful photography website

268: Alex Vita – Everything you need for a successful photography website

 

Andrew Hellmich: Today's guest is Alex Vita of Foreground Web. My first contact with him was for episode 108 of this podcast where the content he shared then is just as relevant today. And honestly, I don't know where to start with this introduction today. I feel like anything I say will be selling him short. He's that good, because not long after episode 108 Alex became my go to guy for anything website related. This guy is an absolute wizard when it comes to anything online. Now, what Alex focuses on with his business Foreground Web is helping other photographers grow their business with a great web presence in two different ways. He either builds websites for them. He has almost 10 years’ experience, having worked on over 200 websites for photographers from 25 different countries. The other way he helps them is he teaches photographers to improve their online businesses themselves through some of the best educational content you'll find, including articles his newsletter and the resources all available over at foregroundweb.com. He also does website teardowns, SEO audits, and he shows photographers with a need to improve. Plus he does some consulting and strategy calls as well, and I've used him for all these things. That's why I just feel like I'm selling him short in this intro, but I'm rapt to say that I have him back with this now. Alex, welcome back to the podcast.

Alex Vita: Hi Andrew. I'm humbled by that introduction. Thanks for having me on the podcast again.

Andrew Hellmich: Mate. It's my pleasure. And I mean, the listener doesn't know this, but anytime I have a problem, you know, I'm on the email to you, and over the years, since we've been working together and you've been helping me, you know, you've brought me back from this, one of the sites I've got being hacked, and now this is on a Sunday, and I'm in the middle of nowhere, and you just come to the rescue so much. I don't know how you do it, but it's a credit to you. So thank you for your help.

Alex Vita: Happy to help, and I'm grateful as well. The last time I was on your show, I received a lot of great feedback from people. I'm still getting emails from photographers telling me they heard about my work from your show, so I'm grateful for that.

Andrew Hellmich: Awesome, awesome. Well, mate, let's kick this thing off and get some content for the listener and make it worthwhile for them. And I guess the first thing I want to know is, when it comes to websites, so much focus is put on SEO, and I guess I'm a little bit guilty of that. It wasn't so hard for me to start ranking for my sites, but I know a lot of newer photographers really struggle to rank. How important is SEO?

Alex Vita: Okay. So this is a big question, and I want to answer it right, and I know you're asking very practical questions to your interviewees all the time. If you've reached over 250 episodes so far. So I want this to feel the same, so feel free just to interrupt me at any point, to keep this conversational, you can be kind of the voice of the audience, basically, and everything this topic was triggered for me. I wrote an article a few weeks ago called 'Don't Obsess Over SEO'. It was kind of controversial. It was a list of things you should be taking care of on your site before doing the advanced SEO work, because I feel many photographers have kind of the wrong mindset when it comes to SEO, and I want to cure them of this problem and give them some sense of perspective. And I would love them to focus more on user experience on the website UX. And the reason I care so much about this topic is because I see that some photographers are still using SEO techniques from five or 10 years ago. They usually kind of consider it a game. They try to trick Google into ranking them higher. Sometimes, you know, those techniques have stopped working. They can even hurt your ranking these days. Or sometimes I see photographers who are up to date on kind of the current SEO principles, but they invest too much time into it instead of prioritizing other more important changes on their website. I call it SEO procrastination basically. A good analogy is when you're trying to build a new business and you waste a month or two just tweaking the logo, the branding, and you don't do any substance work. So that's my feeling for it. SEO work is important, but other website improvements are sometimes better worth your time. That's what I feel like.

Andrew Hellmich: I think the first thing the listener would be thinking in their head, and I am too, is, well, if I don't do SEO, how am I going to get people to my website? But that's got to be the first important thing. Don't I have to get people to see my work so they can book me?

Alex Vita: Well, yeah, it makes sense. And SEO does that. It offers the promise of the relatively cheap, organic traffic. That's why everyone's obsessed with traffic, right? Because you get better rankings, that leads to more organic traffic. But then what? What do you do next? Because if your main focus is just raising the number of visitors on your site, you'll notice soon that you've reached a kind of a limit, a plateau that happens when either you've not differentiated your site enough, like you've not chosen a niche for your photography website, so it's hard to get noticed by people, it's hard to market yourself. That's usually the case, and you know that very well. You can push that limit using advertising. And Facebook ads are all the rage these days, and there's effective but there's a limit to that as well. Right diminishing returns. You can't buy ads all the time to push that traffic limit. So that's why SEO kind of offers that promise of extra traffic, but most photographers don't look too much on how well that traffic is performing on their website. They try to get more traffic. But if that traffic is performing poorly, that's bad. And you can tell how that traffic is doing in Google Analytics, for example, you can see that your bounce rates are high, that maybe your traffic is going up over time. It's growing, but your conversion rates are declining. You don't see people taking action or other reports like the average time on page, or pages per session, they're staying low. So that's why maybe some photographers should switch to conversion rates as a focus, right? Because if you increase the percentage of people that actually take an action on the website, then any other future SEO efforts or traffic increasing efforts, they'll be more effective as well.

Andrew Hellmich: Got it all right. I want to dive into that user experience and conversion rates and getting a visitor to take action just a second. But you know, you mentioned bounce rates. I mean, that's one big thing, and I know that a lot of people get scared when they go into Google Analytics. And I was one of these people, too. Man, this looks way too complicated. If I look at bounce rates, I can see that what's a good bounce rate, what number should I be aiming for, or what's a number that I should be worried about?

Alex Vita: Well, from what I've seen from other photography websites, usually, if you have anything below 40% or so, that's excellent. That's great. Stat is somewhere between 40 and 70. I'd say that's average, somewhere in there. It kind of depends on your niche, on the type of website, if you have a blog or not, if it's just a portfolio, but anything above 70% as a bounce rate, it's on the bad side, right? It means that people exit the site too soon.

Andrew Hellmich: If you have an over 70% bounce rate, it means a visitor has come to your site because Google has sent them there. They've done a search, they landed on your site and they've gone, this isn't for me. They hit the back button and disappear back to Google.

Alex Vita: Exactly. So the traffic that you're getting through SEO, through ads or through other means, it's not performing well, it's not converting. Because the whole reason for the website in the first place is to get more sales right, to get more clients, to sell more images and so forth. So if they bounce, you're wasting that traffic. And Google also takes notice, and it starts ranking you lower. So that's why you should focus more on conversion rates, and this is how photographers feel about SEO in general. It's simpler. I'm not saying it's easy. SEO is hard if you do it right, right? It's not easy, but it's simpler to tackle. That's what relationship photographers have with SEO, because presumably you just follow some SEO tips and tricks you find online, you follow some you read the articles and courses, and that's all great, and you end up with more traffic on your website that should lead to a bigger profit in your business, right? But there are other harder decisions you need to think about, and people are neglecting those and focusing only on SEO. For example, if you want to make design changes on your website, to tweak your website that's hard, right? It requires technical skills. It requires maybe hiring a web professional, and those come with their own sets of hurdles, right? If you want to improve the user experience on your website, which we'll talk about today, that kind of demands a change in your mindset. You need to focus on your audience and not on yourself, right? Because the website is not for you as a site owner. It's for your audience, and to understand your audience, that's also hard, right? It requires introspection. It requires analysis and research, and if you want to trim down your portfolio to only kind showcase your best work and not have it shallow. That's also hard, right? It's fighting all those inner fears, the fear of success, the fear of failure. You need to let go of all your past work. So it's all hard, whereas SEO is it's an easier target to aim at. That's why it's considered a game that you can kind of win if you follow some rules.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, so let's say I'm spending money on Facebook ads, and my SEO is good, so I've got this great lot of traffic coming to my website, these visitors, and my bounce rates high, or I'm not converting. So when you say I'm not converting or I'm not getting someone to take action. What do you mean? Like, what do I want someone to do when they get to my website, and ultimately I want them to book me? Is there steps in between them landing on my website and then booking me?

Alex Vita: Well, usually there are. It depends on how your website is structured, because it kind of depends on the flow that people take on your website when they first land on your site. So they might go from your home page to your portfolio to see your images, then to a services page or a page where you describe your pricing, or something like that, and then to your contact page. That's kind of flow through your website. Or another one would be, if you're blogging as a photographer, they find you through a blog post. So they land on a blog post on your website. Where do they go from there, right? They go maybe to your about page again to learn about your services or your products, and then to book you as a photographer. So it obviously depends on the type of work the photographer does, but the end goal is to get sales, either clients or prints or image licenses. So somewhere in between, there are some steps, usually, because people don't just land on your website, cold traffic and they convert immediately. You need to take them there. You need to impress them with the quality of your work and inspire trust in them. But that's the ultimate goal. So photographers need to track results and not just traffic. Traffic alone is kind of a vanity metric. You're happy with doubling of traffic, but the sales stayed the same. That's why conversion rates are poor. So they go hand in hand, but it's hard to link them one to another, and that's where website experience plays a role, right? You improve that rate.

Andrew Hellmich: All right. So you mentioned how a visitor might track through your website depending on where they come into your website, and you also mentioned user experience before or UX? Are they the same thing, like the track and the course that the visitor takes, and user experience? Are they the same thing?

Alex Vita: Good question. Well, user experience might seem like different from SEO, like it precedes SEO, but user experience, UX, in short, is, in fact, SEO, and I want this to make this very clear to everyone listening, I'm not against SEO. This is not what this call is all about. In fact, quite the opposite. I understand the power of SEO. I work on SEO for my own side and for my clients. So if you want to get serious about SEO, you can check out the Cory Potter episode you did recently, and I've written about SEO on my side as well. I do reviews for SEO for websites, but I just don't like seeing it prioritized over important stuff that's running away from harder decisions. So that's where UX comes in. Maybe it's easier if we define it first. What is user experience? It's having a pleasant and informative website which keeps users on your site and lets them have a good time using it. That's it in a nutshell. That's more important than small SEO tweaks sometimes or forcing keywords into your content, and kind of Google openly acknowledges this. Every algorithm changes they've done recently was were to move in this direction, right? Because, let's look at the overall picture, right? So since there were search engines, people have been trying to game that system. They wanted to rank higher because that provides them with traffic, and Google is always one step ahead. They're changing their algorithms. They want to prevent all the spammy tactics and anything dishonest. And how do they do that? They just focus on how people make browsing choices and they turn those into ranking factors. That's Google's philosophy basically. If people stay on your site longer, because your website is responsive when you're on your phone, great, Google takes notice of that. If people land on your website and they're navigating to more of your pages related to what we talked about bounce rates and time on site, Google will think your website is worth more. Or if you're blogging and you're posting useful and honest posts, people are linking to them. They're sharing them, again, Google thinks your website is more important, so user experience is SEO basically. You're helping your SEO efforts a lot by making sure your website is built right, and the experience for your users is good.

Andrew Hellmich: All right, that makes sense. Because when you first said user experience is SEO, I'm thinking, how are they the same? But now I get it, because if you give your visitor a good experience, your bounce rates will be low. People are going to spend time on your site. Google rank you more highly. I love it. That's so simple. So how do we make user experience better? So we've got a visitor coming to our site, I guess is the best place to start, the home page, like, let's say visitor comes to the home page, because I'm guessing that's where most visitors will end up. How do we make the user experience good or better?

Alex Vita: Okay, so I've tried to think of ways to improve user experience, and I've broken it down into two separate categories, which I think will make more sense to everyone listening. The first part is the technical stuff, which is related to a good browsing experience in general. It's stuff that can be outsourced. If you don't have the knowledge for it, you can hire a web designer. They usually take care of that. They make your website look good. And the other category is more abstract, more intangible things. They are specific to the content that you put on your website, to your niche as a photographer, to your personality to your personal preference. That's the harder part. We'll try to cover that later, after the technical stuff. So maybe we can start with the first part. And I've looked at hundreds of photo websites in my time. I've read articles about what photo buyers want, what they expect from a website, I've listened to recordings on what photo editors prefer to see on a website. So basically, I've grown to paint a few details when I see on a website, when I review a website, it's something I immediately detect. And I hope we can cover all the aspects here. And yeah, people get an idea.

Andrew Hellmich: So what are you saying? So if someone hires you, or you land on a photographer's website, you have this mental checklist that you sort of tick off whether they're doing it right or wrong.

Alex Vita: Exactly

Andrew Hellmich: All right. Let's give it. Let's have a look. Tell us what the checklist is and show us what we're doing wrong.

Alex Vita: Well, when I first look at a photography websites, of course, one of the first things I noticed is an ugly and an outdated design in general. This might sound a bit too generic, but let's deconstruct it a bit, because an ugly website. When I get to photographers website and it's ugly, it's messy. That usually happens because maybe it's an old site and it's been neglected for a long time, for a few years, so it's gone out of fashion. That happens or photographers themselves don't have a good design sense in general. They're disorganized in general. I've seen that as well. It's how clean is your desktop right now, Andrew?, do you have just a few icons, or is it a mess?

Andrew Hellmich: Mine's very neatly laid out, and so is my actual desk that I'm working on.

Alex Vita: Well, perfect, but you've seen other people who have a mess on their desktop.

Andrew Hellmich: Absolutely.

Alex Vita: That reflects on their website as well. Or sometimes they're not very technical, they're not internet savvy, so they don't know how to master a specific website tool. That happens sometimes as well, or they're just starting out, they don't have the budget to hire a professional, or they're reluctant to hire professionals in other industry or web designer. So it's understandable that some people don't have a good website, and most of the time, some photographers come to me, "Hey, my website is bad. How can I start fresh? Can you build a new website for me?" And I feel that most of the times, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. This is the good news. You can rework your existing website. You can tweak it. You can redesign it, instead of starting from scratch, which is a lot more complex and more expensive and so forth. Even if you make insignificant changes design details like font sizes and spacing of the elements and colors added up together, they can still have a good, big impact on where your visitors are clicking and how their experience is on your website.

Andrew Hellmich: Alex, you know, you said you turn up to some websites, and you said, they're just ugly. And you said, you know, that sounds fit stuff. You know, when you say ugly, I know that's a very broad description. Can you give me an idea, like, is it an ugly colored background? Is it bad fonts? Is it too many photos? What do you mean by ugly?

Alex Vita: Well. If I had to do kind of an 80-20 analysis, an ugly design, it's it doesn't include white space, so it's all very crammed. It's very messy. It's very busy in that way, everything is pushed together. There's that myth about having a lot of stuff above the fold on the website. So people add a lot of stuff to the header, and everything is pushed upwards. That makes it all feel very messy. Sometimes the header is very cluttered. That has to do with the navigation menu. We'll tackle that later. Maybe it's too long. It has too many menu items. Some people push a lot of other stuff in the header, like they put extra links, they put some banners, they put some I don't know, it's just..

Andrew Hellmich: It just looks ugly.

Alex Vita: Well, I can deconstruct this, because I've kind of developed a design sense. And when elements are part of a grid, for example, your logo on the left needs to be aligned perfectly with all the other boxes on their websites. On the left, all those small alignments, they just look clean to the eye. You don't know why they just look clean all that stuff about aligning issues, about being consistent with colors and fonts, because I see some fonts used in the header, and then if I scroll down, it's a completely different set of fonts. Some are bold, then you use uppercase and all of that. And the reason why that looks messy is it creates confusion. And the opposite of confusion is familiarity, in this case, and that kind of plays a big role in user experience, because if people browse through your website and they notice different styles on different pages, they feel maybe it's part of a separate website, and they kind of remain vigilant, right? Even if they rationally know it's the same website. It's something doesn't look right to them. It's different. Why have you changed the colors here? Why have you changed the fonts here? Why is the header slightly different? And this is important if you have a kind of a hybrid site, if you pair WordPress with a different platform, when you jump from one to another, the header should be different, the colors should be different, it should all be consistent.

Andrew Hellmich: They should be the same, or they should be different?

Alex Vita: Sorry, they should be the same.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay

Alex Vita: They shouldn't be different.

Andrew Hellmich: So I'm using something like Pixieset with my WordPress site. The Pixieset branding should look similar to my WordPress website.

Alex Vita: Exactly, as much as possible. Some platforms don't allow advanced like coding. You can't tweak the template to match exactly. Some do, but at least using the same branding, the same logo, the same navigation menu, the same colors and fonts, if possible. So people feel it's the same website.

Andrew Hellmich: Got it.

Alex Vita: It's just an important user experience factor, basically.

Andrew Hellmich: Cool. All right, so what are some other things on this checklist that you go through when you land on a site?

Alex Vita: Well, a big thing I noticed, and I've touched on it a bit, is typography. If you just improve your site's fonts, that's kind of one of the best ways to make a better browsing experience and reading experience. It doesn't have to be complicated. Typography sounds so complicated, just a few rules would be to choose the right font face, a font that maybe matches your logo and that kind of sets the mood for your entire site depending on the type of work you do. Use a sans serif font for a modern site. Use a serif font for kind of an old look, a different mood for the site. That's usually how it goes. Setting a larger font size, 16 pixels or above, would be my recommendation, and setting a line height that's appropriate as well. So that needs to be at least 1.5 a multiple of the font size. So for example, on my website, I have the font size is set to 17 pixels and the line height is set to 30 pixels, so that makes it all large and easy to read and it flows better basically.

Andrew Hellmich: Got it, okay. So if I'm redesigning my website or trying to tidy it up, how many different fonts do you recommend? Is it as simple as having two fonts and that's enough, one for headings and one for the body content?

Alex Vita: Yes, in most cases, two is enough. I used two as well, and for my own side for websites that I built, I like to use a different font for headings and a different one for the body copy, for which I usually use a sans serif font just because it looks cleaner and more modern. But for headings, I sometimes use a more interesting font, a serif font that has more personality because the headings are larger, so they look more interesting. And all website platforms kind of interface with Google Fonts most of the times. Or if you use WordPress, you can use a plugin for that so you can choose from the vast Google Fonts collection. Or some people use Typekit, which is owned by Adobe. Either way, you have plenty of fonts to choose from, but no need to use more than two, three rarely if you just need to use a third form for something special. But more than that, it's too much. And it's not just about the number of font faces. It's about the size, about just using a few font sizes. And that's it. Not going overboard with five different font sizes across the page. Heading is larger than something in between, than a regular body, than small text, that's too much. Keep it simple and you're good to go.

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I go to a site like medium.com and it's so easy and nice to read, it's like, it's almost relaxing. They're nice. Short paragraphs, there's lots of white space that copy is big or large.

Alex Vita: There's plenty of space.

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah. And then you go to some photographers websites, it's like, "Oh, man, I've got a squint, and I'm not that old, and I've got a squint to read. It's like, why are you making it so hard for me?"

Alex Vita: Yeah, if listeners just take something away from this, it's just they need to increase their body font size and their line height. That makes the whole world of difference.

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah, awesome. All right, what's next on your list?

Alex Vita: Well, a big pet peeve of mine is the navigation menu. That's usually a common mistakes I see on websites. Maybe, if you have a photography website and it's been growing over time, you keep adding stuff to the menu, to the drop downs and everything, and it kind of the menu becomes a dumping ground of all your site pages. Some of them are old. They don't no longer represent your business. Photographers should clean up the navigation menu. They should reduce the number of menu items in the top level. They can use drop downs. Just needs to not be overwhelming. When you land on a website, you don't need to think too much about where to go to next. Menu should be simple.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, what about Alex? Because I know that there's a lot of photographers that will shoot, and I'm one of them. You know, I shoot some commercial work, I shoot portraits and I shoot weddings. Should they be in my top level navigation? Should I have a splash page when they first come to my website? Like, how do I split those potential clients up?

Alex Vita: Well, that's a really hard question, and it comes down to not just the navigation menu about it comes down to the whole website structure entirely, whether you should have all those different fields under the same roof and the same website. That's a different decision. We can talk about it a bit.

Andrew Hellmich: Well, let's use that as an example. Let's say you can use me as an example, because I'm sure other photographers are doing the same doing some commercial, some portrait, some wedding. Now, do you want to have them on the same website?

Alex Vita: Yeah. Well, my recommendation, yeah. Then it's fine to keep them under the same website. In that case, in the navigation menu, they should each have its own menu item and maybe a drop down, assuming you want some subpages for each section. That's perfectly fine. And very important is what you do on the home page. Usually you want people landing on your home page to have entry ways into each of those three sections. That's why you use some sort of boxes of like a heading, a paragraph and a button, maybe for each of those three sections, maybe in three columns, so it's easy to choose from. That's what I like to see on a photography website when you land on a homepage, so people can immediately see when they land on the homepage what your website is all about, the three main categories you work in. So you do that on the homepage, and you do that the navigation menu. It's simpler. It's at the top of the navigation menu.

Andrew Hellmich: Got it? Yeah, okay. And I see some photographers trying to get a little bit fancy with the way they name their menu items, you know, instead of Contact, you know, say, ‘Get in Touch’, or, you know, they just try and change it up a little bit. Is that a good idea to try and stand out?

Alex Vita: Oh, well, no, the answer is no. Sometimes I think they're trying to be too clever, and that creates confusion. Some people just leave your website when they get confused too much, all those extra milliseconds, that's what we're talking about. That's confusion. They don't feel right. They don't feel easy navigating your website, so don't use too clever words. Just keep it simple. Just use Contact usually that sits at the end of the navigation menu. It's the last menu item. No sense in being too clever, because, yeah, I think I've made my point. Yeah, and a few other mistakes I'd like to mention about navigation menu is the number of menu items, ideally they should be kind of five to seven. If you go above seven, that's a bit too much, usually, and you can organize them into drop downs if you need more, that's perfectly fine. The menu, you know, it's at the top or on the left side of the website. It depends whatever the location it is, as I've told you earlier, it should be in kind of in a consistent place throughout the website, especially if you have a hybrid site for two different sections. So don't have the menu at the top in WordPress, and if you go to a different platform, it's on the left, it feels like a different website. And common question I get is whether you should include home or home page in the navigation menu. I'd say that's fine if you have few menu items, like you have below seven, if you have more than that, no, that's too much. Don't put Home in there as well. People can just click on the logo to get back to the home page. That's more than enough, yeah.

Andrew Hellmich: Cool. I'm guessing there's more to this list.

Alex Vita: Yes, a lot to cover, because a lot of mistakes I see on websites. And if we go further and just want to touch a bit more on navigation, there are other forms of navigation on the website. Is not just the menu. If you have call to action buttons at the end of pages that link to other pages in your website. That's a form of navigation as well. Well, we'll talk about that later.

Andrew Hellmich: Hang on. You mean, at the bottom of blog page, if I've written an article on the best locations in Terrigal for wedding photography, and then at the bottom of that article, I say, "Click here to see some examples of these locations." Is that what you mean?

Alex Vita: Exactly.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, yes.

Alex Vita: That's a call to action. And at the end of on your home page, you should have call to actions like guiding people to other sections in your website, and at the end of your about page invite them to contact you and things like that. That's navigation as well, in a more general sense.

Andrew Hellmich: So let's say I'm purely a wedding photographer or purely a portrait photographer. What if I have someone land on my home page and the next page I want them to go to is my gallery? Let's say that's the only place I want them to go there because I'm different from everyone else. Can I just have just that one button in my navigation? Or is that suicide? Is that going too drastic?

Alex Vita: I'd say that's too drastic. You're blocking users from having more options, you're forcing them to visit that specific page. That's a bit too much for my taste. It's like having you know, when you land on wedding website, for example, and all you can see is one photo and then a button in the website. That's too much. Why are you blocking me from seeing the full content. The same is here you're forcing them to visit one single page. I prefer a much more kind of passive approach. You leave the navigation menu. It should be consistent throughout the site, but at the end of your content, you're just encouraging them to follow your story on a kind of a specific path. You're not forcing them.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, yeah, cool. Is there anything else that you wanted to add about navigation?

Alex Vita: Well, yeah, so call to action buttons are navigation as well. If you have a slideshow like you want to or you show images on your website, you see a large image a portfolio or in a lightbox view, if you give users some quick navigation between images, like left and right arrows. Or you allow them to use their keyboard arrows to switch. That's navigation as well. That creates a better experience. Or when you go inside a gallery, you have collections and sub galleries, and then you go down to an image level, is it easy for them to navigate back up to a parent gallery or collection. Usually, that's done through bread crumbs at the top of the page. Or you're making it easy, that's navigation as well, right? So think about navigation in more general terms. It's not just the menu at the top.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, I love what you said about the slider images, because I go to some sites and I can see there's like, six or seven slider images, but they're making me wait four or five seconds to see each one. I'm like, "Oh, man, I'm not hanging around for this. I just want that navigate that right arrow to go and see all the photos."

Alex Vita: That's so true.

Andrew Hellmich: Alex, you said breadcrumbs. What does that mean?

Alex Vita: Well, breadcrumbs are just some small links which usually sit at the top of the page, which lists kind of the hierarchy through your website, how you've drilled down into a specific gallery. So let's say you're on your home page, then people click on your portraits collection, and then inside that, they go into a gallery called 'Jane and John', which is a gallery of their photos. And then they go to an image. The breadcrumbs are just small links at the top of the page would say home/portrait/Jane and John. So you know where you are. You can see this on Amazon or E commerce site, it's common.

Andrew Hellmich: So I can get back to the page just before the one I'm on, or I can go back two or three steps with one?

Alex Vita: Exactly. It's easier to jump back to where you were, how many levels, instead of just using the back button in your browser. It's a small navigation aid. Yeah.

Andrew Hellmich: When you said navigation, all I thought was menu. That was it. But there's so much more to it.

Alex Vita: Yeah. Exactly. It's all navigation, so all the important areas in your website should be accessible and in two clicks max. That's the ideal, giving people quick access to what you have to offer. So, yeah, that's the idea.

Andrew Hellmich: Cool. All right, what's next?

Alex Vita: Okay, well, next up is two common issues that I know people are aware of, that's performance and mobile friendliness. With performance, I don't need to delve too much into it. Everyone hates slow websites. Photo buyers do as well. Google does as well. So the three main tips I'd have here for photographers specifically, they need to optimize their images. They need to have some sort of performance or caching plugin, and they need to test their websites. If you do these three things well, you have a really fast website. If we break it down, optimizing images is all about the image dimensions in pixels, because DPI is irrelevant for the web, so only pixel dimensions matter on the website. Web photographers shouldn't upload high res images to a WordPress site that's just asking for them to be stolen, because people can access them through the source code, so they need to size their images first before uploading to the website. Then it's the file size, which matters a lot for performance. That comes down to JPEG compression, and how low of a compression level you're comfortable with before introducing noise in the photo. And the third thing is the type of file type you have. Sometimes PNG files are better for smaller graphics, like your logo and everything. They don't need to be JPEG. But most of the times, for photography, you use JPEG and in an sRGB color space, because that's what browsers understand, and that's how you optimize images, basically.

Andrew Hellmich: So when you talk about optimization of an image, can I use something like JPEG Mini to make that file size smaller and also resize it before I send it to my website? Is that a good tool to use?

Alex Vita: Yes, that's a good tool, and I recommend people use those. And there are external tools like JPEG Mini or there are WordPress plugins that do that automatically when you upload an image, but that's the last step. The pixel dimensions matter first, because even if you take a high res image that's 4000 plus pixels wide, if you put that into JPEG Mini it will compress it a bit, but it's still a huge file, whereas your website just needs a 1000 pixel image, so you need to resize them first, sure.

Andrew Hellmich: But this is such a minefield for photographers, because, you know, my first blog, my images are 600 pixels wide, and that was great, but now that would look totally rubbish on a large retina screen, you know. And then even now, my sites, you know, I went from 1024 pixels wide to 2048 Shouldn't we be putting a larger dimension image on there to cope with newer monitors as they come out?

Alex Vita: Well, yeah, but it's a game of compromises, because you're affecting website performance, so you need to adapt as the industry changes. Right now, like full with slideshow images or homepage images, they should be 2000 to 2500 pixels wide. If you go larger than that, then you've reached high res territory, right off the camera. Basically, that's a huge file size. So it's a game of compromises. I know retina screens, that's a different issue, because you'd need to maybe size your images double the size so it looks really sharp on retina screens. But how large of an image can you add to the website? If you have your images above 500 kilobytes or above one megabyte, that's huge. The website is too slow, so you need to find that middle ground. I understand it's frustrating that you need to then change a couple of years later, but it's just the nature of the industry.

Andrew Hellmich: I guess using my first blog as an example probably wasn't the best either, because, I mean, those photos are so out of date now, anyway, so I guess, yeah, I just have to adapt and just suck it up, do the work.

Alex Vita: Yeah, because performance is important and it's a compromise. Yeah, I understand.

Andrew Hellmich: I know you mentioned mobile friendliness. I don't, not sure if you know, but Corey talked quite a lot about that with SEO in that interview with him. Is there anything that you know that you want to specifically add about mobile friendliness?

Alex Vita: Well, it's glad that Corey covered that. I don't need to talk about too much about it, basically, for photography websites in particular, again, it's making sure you size your photos right. And it's kind of all website platform these days are responsive. It's hard to find a WordPress theme or a template that's not responsive. So you're fine in that department, unless you're building your website, coding it from scratch, which most photographers don't do, it's fine. It's just something to be aware of and to just test your website on mobile devices. It's fine.

Andrew Hellmich: Got it all right. Let's keep working through your checklist.

Alex Vita: Yeah. So a few other technical user experience details. Another pet peeve of mine is seeing distracting backgrounds on a photography website. I hate when I see that, because I can't focus on the images when there's something distracting in a background, and it doesn't happen that often, but I've seen photographers have kind of a texture or even a blurry photo in the background of the website. It was all colorful, and it doesn't make sense, because when you're taking a photo, when you're out shooting, you always pay attention to what's in the background of your composition, so it's not distracting in any way. So why not apply the same mindset to your website?

Andrew Hellmich: Very true.

Alex Vita: Yeah. The idea here is stick with a solid color background. Usually white works best. Some people say black makes the images pop out more. That's true, the colors look a bit more vibrant, but black text is harder to read. White text on a black background is hard. It's hurting the eye, so most of the times, just go with the white background, or I like a very light shade of gray, sometimes that adds a bit of an elegant feel, but pure white is fine. A few other mistakes I see when I navigate photography websites is I see broken links. I use your navigation menu and I end up on a 404 page, not found error, or some links on your home page. Obviously, this comes down to testing. Again, it happens when you add or remove content from your website and you don't update your navigation accordingly, especially if you have a hybrid website, like we've talked about, or if photographers change their domain name, they need to check the entire website, because they might have removed content and so forth. So it's just bad to see when people run into broken links, they immediately lose trust, they lose patience, and you don't want to look like you don't care.

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah, is there an easy way to find out which links are broken, like, can I get a report from Google, or do I just have to go through and work it out myself or find them?

Alex Vita: Well, you have two options. Number one is in Google Search Console, which is kind of the must use tool for website owners, besides maybe Google Analytics .In Google Search Console, in the index coverage report, they give you all the error pages on your website, what pages Google wasn't able to index, so that's a good place to detect them. Other than that, there are broken link checker tools. If you just Google that phrase, broken link checker tools, you'll find tools that automatically scan, they crawl through your entire website, and when they find an error, they let you know it's that simple.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, now you mentioned I've already forgot the name of it, and you told me that the one thing that photographers must use, or website owners Google which page was it?

Alex Vita: The Google Search Console. It was called to Google Webmaster Tools in the past.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, so Google console, a web console. I had a report come from them, and there were some warnings. I had some things wrong. And you being my go to guy, I said, "Alex, what do these mean? I got no idea what this stuff means." And you just said, "Oh, that's not to worry about, and I can fix that one." So for me, I had no idea what these things meant. Do I just Google what those things mean, if I don't have an Alex, what do you do?

Alex Vita: Well, if you don't have an Alex, which is really bad.

Andrew Hellmich: Absolutely

Alex Vita: Yeah, I guess you Google what those errors mean. I'm sure there's plenty of articles out there about how to solve all of them, and Google kind of explains them. Some of them are hard 404 errors, like pages on your website which don't exist, and they tell you which website, which pages link to that error page, so you know where to go in and fix them. Other times, it's different types of errors, indexing problems. Google can't access certain sections of your website because of how your website is structured, your SEO settings so forth. You know how to then how to fix that. Of course, you Google that, and sometimes you have soft 404 errors. We don't need to get very technical Google Search Console sometimes throws false positives, that's how I call them, so they couldn't access certain pages, but they exist, so it was a false report. It's harder to get the hang of it, but once you do, it's helpful. It's a helpful tool. And other than that, Google Search Console is the must have tool, and it's free. It's by Google because it has a second very important report, which is the search performance. It's what keywords people are finding your site for you can't see that in Google Analytics. You just see organic traffic. And for keywords, it just says not provided. But you have that info in Google Search Console, you can see what people are typing in to Google and then they're landing on your web page. That's a gold mine of information.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, so if I know that the traffic's coming via a certain search term or keyword phrase, and Google Search Console has told me that then I can stop focusing so much on that keyword phrase and start working on other ones. Is it how you would use that?

Alex Vita: I'd start focusing more on those keywords because, you know they're working. You could go into those pages or those blog posts and you optimize them even further, and you don't just get a list of keywords and phrases, you get the position in Google search results where you rank at, and you also get the CTR, the click through rate. So for example, you're ranking for a certain phrase, let's say,

Andrew Hellmich: Let's say, let's think of a 'Central Coast Wedding Photographer'.

Alex Vita: Okay, so you see that in Google Search Console, one of your blog posts, for example, or gallery, is ranking for that term. And you can see the position is 15, so you're on the second page of Google for that, right? And the CTR, the click through rate is 2%, so 2% of the people who see your website in Google search results, only 2% of them click through that means that's an opportunity to improve things, and you do that by putting that phrase or those keywords on your page more often, in your heading, in your permalink or you update your meta description and your SEO title, so Google ranks you higher for that. And when it's not about Google's position, it's when people see your meta description in search results. Are they intrigued by it? Does it sound natural to them? Does it sound like a website they want to click on? That's how you improve things. By looking at that info in Google Search Console, and you think of ways to improve those stats.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, so when you're talking about meta description, this is the little phrase that I see when I do a search in Google. Say I search for 'Central Coast Wedding Photographer', my website will show up, and I'll have a little phrase underneath so I can change that phrase with something like Yoast SEO tool.

Alex Vita: Exactly

Andrew Hellmich: Okay. And I want to write something intriguing there enough to have people thinking, "Oh, that looks interesting. I'm going to click through and have a look at that site."

Alex Vita: Exactly. It's not just about cramming more keywords in there. That's not how it works. Think about human visitors, searchers on Google. How they interpret that text that you put in there? How are you encouraging them to give you their click? And that's a meta description along with the SEO title. You can control those through a plugin like Yoast, if you use WordPress, and a small note here that the meta description used to be around 150-160 characters. Now that's been expanded to 300 characters. Google increased the limit so you can write longer meta description. They now can take up three or four rows of text in Google search results, not just two.

Andrew Hellmich: Nice. And I've noticed that inside the Yoast SEO tool, because I have a WordPress site, and yeah, it doesn't turn to red as quickly now I can write a fair bit more in there.

Alex Vita: Yes

Andrew Hellmich: Cool

Alex Vita: Exactly.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, so we're working through the user experience, the technical stuff to give our visitors a good browsing experience. I think we've gone through a bunch. Is there any more to add to this list?

Alex Vita: Well, just keeping this short is other mistakes I see is seeing intro pages or splash screens or annoying pop ups. I don't know if you want to dive deeper into those, but like I said, if you have an intro page where you're just showing me a photo and an enter website button. That's bad. If I land on your home page and I immediately see a big pop up, just immediately, and if it doesn't have a close button, or I can't press the Escape key on my keyword to get rid of it, I'm annoyed. I sometimes leave the website, you can do that more discreetly. I know pop ups work. I use them on my website as well because they work, but you can do it more discreetly. It's what it's called, exit intent pop ups so they only show up when visitors signal that they want to close the tab, or only show them after people have scrolled down to half of the page or after 30 seconds and things like that. It's less intrusive basically.

Andrew Hellmich: Anything else that you hate when you turn up to a website?

Alex Vita: For wedding photographers, specifically, I hate auto playing music.

Andrew Hellmich: I've seen that on baby photographers as well. Newborn photographers, they often have that as well.

Alex Vita: Yeah, and I guess their intentions are good. They want to set the mood for me when I view their images, but my mood is bad afterwards. I like to listen to my own music and my speakers so I can set my own mood. And when I open the website and it's a bit of a jingle in the background, I'm a nerd, so yeah, that's a mistake. Another one would be if it's a stock site or kind of an archival site, I like to see some search functionality. I like to see a search box so I can search for an image based on keywords, and not just have to browse through the entire set of galleries. It's common sense. All stock sites use that, but some photographers, only those who have a large archive of images, if you just have a small portfolio site, if you're just presenting your best work, you don't need a search function, of course.

Andrew Hellmich: I just, quickly go ahead. Now you go on first. I'll come back to my question about music.

Alex Vita: Well, just finishing up on the technical details, slideshow controls, like you mentioned, sometimes the images are too small. Like you said, you had 600 pixel images, you can, of course, have bigger images these days for better visual impact, if you have distracting watermarks, that's a whole separate discussion about watermarks and image theft, but they shouldn't be distracting. They shouldn't cover the center of the photo somewhere in the corner. It's fine. Or I see low res images on websites. They're too compressed. They're noisy. Press me as a photo buyer, for example, if the images are noisy. You don't care about technical details. Another thing I hate is long contact forms. If I want to get in touch with a photographer just to ask a question about his website or whatever, why am I forced to fill in a wedding date? For example?

Andrew Hellmich: Because they make it a must fill out field, don't they, some of them?

Alex Vita: Exactly. So the solution is to not make those fields required, or to have two separate contact forms, a generic one and another one have a link there. If you want to inquire about a wedding or an event, click here and you show them a different contact form that's more specific to them. And finally, common mistake is poor spelling and grammar and semantics. That makes sense. It just looks like you don't care about your website. There are tools for that. Just put your page content through a free tool like Grammarly, for example, and that tells you all the mistakes, it makes sense.

Andrew Hellmich: This is where you need a Linda. Linda's my proofreader, so if anyone finds any spelling mistakes, typos, grammar issues on the PhotoBizX website, we can direct those complaints to Linda.

Alex Vita: And that's a good point, actually, because all these technical stuff that we covered, most of them can be outsourced. You can have people help you with them if you don't have experience with building a website. So that's a good point. Cool. So what did you want to ask me about music?

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah. So, like, I know you said auto playing music is a bad idea, but I'm sure that some photographers really want to have music. They can still have music on their site as an option, can't they?

Alex Vita: Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, so just have the music file there ready to go, and the visitor has to press play to get the music, right?

Alex Vita: Yeah. And this also applies to a video. If you have a video on your homepage or your about page, some photographers do that. That's great. Let me click the play button. Don't make it play automatically, because then I'm a power user. I open 10s of tabs in the browser. I move quickly, and sometimes I need to track down the tab that's playing something in the background. That's bad.

Andrew Hellmich: One of the things I see, I haven't seen it so much on photographers websites, but I have on like internet marketers, I'll have no navigation on the video either. You know that it's just, you've just got to let it run. I can't fast forward. I can't do anything. I can't even see how long it is. Sometimes that drives me nuts.

Alex Vita: Why does that happen? They're trying to force you to watch their content. How is that good?

Andrew Hellmich: No, I leave. I can't handle it.

Alex Vita: Exactly.

Andrew Hellmich: Well, that is an amazing, long and detailed list, and I mean, I've already learned heap from that. So that was all the technical stuff. You mentioned that there's intangible things as well, things or content and photographer specific things that we can look at or work on. Do you want to cover some of those?

Alex Vita: Yeah, sure. This part is all subjective. It's not something that I can do for a client. They need to work on this themselves, because it's hard. It's specific to their work, to how they write things, the quality of their images. Because it's hard. This is kind of also an opportunity to rise above the competition. Everybody has access to website platform these days. To get a website up is not that difficult. So you differentiate yourself as a photographer by tackling all these harder issues. And let's take them one by one. Number one is you need to understand your audience and then update the copy on your website accordingly. This is the number one thing that photographers don't do, and they don't do it because they don't treat it as a business. So they need to step back and decide who the website is for. What do you want people on the website to do? To purchase some prints, to read the blog post? But without defining that ideal client, it's harder to write the text. It's harder to choose your images, to structure your home page. That's what everything else comes from, and it's something I've written about in the past, about setting your target audience and defining that and I've gathered examples from photographers. Whenever I work with a new client, I give them a form to fill out so I can learn more about their business. And one of the question is, what's your target audience? What's your ideal client? So I just want to read to you, Andrew, two examples, a good one and a bad one.

Andrew Hellmich: Sure

Alex Vita: Target audience. So a bad one. This is what a photographer wrote. "I would like to appeal to all age groups and ethnic groups. I would like to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, and at the same time sell some photos." That's it. So how generic is that?

Andrew Hellmich: That has to be a newer photographer, surely.

Alex Vita: Probably a beginner one.

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah, yeah.

Alex Vita: On the opposite side, here's a good example. And here it goes. I quote, "My ideal client is a mother of one or two young children, aged zero to six, American or Middle Eastern, educated in the US or the UK. She's a professional woman with a high managerial position in marketing, IT, or creative fields, and has her own business. She's from a double income household, loves travel, wants the best for her kids, but suffers from the typical mother's guilt most of the time. Is she working too much?"

Andrew Hellmich: Wow, that's awesome. I mean, I can picture that woman straight away.

Alex Vita: Exactly. So how specific is that? And that gives you an idea of how to phrase everything on your website, what services to offer your audience. How do you communicate with them? It's just, once you define that it's such an useful thing.

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah, that is amazing. I mean, I can already picture the kind of blog posts that I'd be writing for that woman, the type of photos I'm going to be using to show on my site, links and things that I could send her to articles in my email newsletter to that client. Yeah, that is perfect. That is so good.

Alex Vita: Exactly. So maybe we can link to this article in the show notes on my website. It shows you more examples of specific target audience, like audiences like this, and how to write your own, it's basically a list of questions that you can ask yourself, and once you're done, you know how to define your target audience and then where to put that on your website, how to use that info, because that's the end goal, right? It's not just for you. It's how your website gets impacted by that, whether that's on the homepage, in a tagline or a small intro paragraph, just to give people an idea of what the site is all about, whether that in the about page, in the SEO title and meta description, like we talked about, in your buttons, if you have a newsletter, if you're blogging, all of that that's useful.

Andrew Hellmich: Perfect. All right, we'll link to that in the show notes for sure. What's next on your list of user experience, intangible things?

Alex Vita: Well, it's creating that flow through your website using call to action buttons. We talked about that earlier, all that flow through some of the pages, you need to figure out what the main purposes of your website are and how you're guiding people through that flow. I know we've mentioned a few examples, like homepage, then to portfolio, then to their contact page, or things like that. The length of that flow kind of depends on your service offering, right? If you do custom photo shoots which depend on specific client requests, you need them to contact you first, right? So most of your pages will just have a call to action pointing to the contact page. That makes sense. But if you already kind of explain your packages, on your website, your prices, then you can point people to those pages instead of the contact page so they can make an informed decision. It's all about making it clear to them by placing all these links on pages to guide people through your path, you're not forcing them like you talked about.

Andrew Hellmich: Are you saying, add these links at the bottom of the pages. So don't just rely on the menu. You actually want the visitor to read the page and then have a call to action a button to send them where they should go at the bottom of the page.

Alex Vita: Exactly, the navigation menu is just a buffet of options. That's where people can jump from one section to another. But if at the end of your pages, when people have read that page and seen your images, you're guiding them to take the next action. You're taking them by hand to a different page, at the very least, that should be done on the home page, if you don't do it on other pages, at least on the home page. So what should people do? Should they head straight to the contact page to leave your message? That's rarely the right answer. Most of the times, they should view your portfolio to see your best images, or they should head to a services page, or they should dive deeper into your blog. If that's a big part of your website, there's no magic formula. Basically, it depends on your site structure and your business goals, but that's the goal. And I know it's intangible, but it's actually not that difficult to track, and you do that in Google Analytics, you check the bounce rates, you check the pages per session report, so you can see how many pages are people visiting when they're browsing your site. Usually that grows when you add call to action buttons. You can see those reports grow over time, and your bounce rates goes lower. And another great report for this in Google Analytics is if you go to behavior and then behavior flow, it's all a visual representation of where people navigate to on your website. Most of them land on your home page. A certain percentage drops they exit the website, and some of them navigate to a different page. And it shows you visually like a flow, that's where you make an impact using call to action buttons basically.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay. And those call to action, should they just be a text link, or should they be a button? Or does it depend on the layout and the look of the site? Like, how do you create the right kind of call to action?

Alex Vita: Great question. Well, most of the times, I like to use buttons which are more colorful and visual, instead of just text links. Text links sometimes get lost in the page, even if they're underlined or they have a different color than the rest of the body text, they're still smaller, whereas call to action buttons, the big actions they should take at the end of the page, they should be colorful. Now try using colors that contrast the page of the background. Usually it's an accent color from the design. It matches your logo or other elements. They should be large enough to attract attention, but not huge, not you don't want to overpower the entire page design, but something colorful buttons at the end of the page and with enough empty space above and below them, so they stand out. They're not pushed together to a paragraph of text. And finally, I'd say that you should have a maximum of two call to action buttons at the end of the page. Usually it's one, but again, it's not a buffet of options here. You don't have put four buttons here just to link to four different pages, just guide them through one path or two paths through your website. That's enough.

Andrew Hellmich: Got it. Okay. So at the bottom of the gallery, for example, you could have one button that says, "Click here to check my prices", or the other button next to it could say, "Hey, you love my work, click here to go to my contact page."

Alex Vita: Exactly. Everyone should figure out the right flow through your website. If you have an E commerce site. If you're selling prints and licenses straight on your website, then when you get to an image, obviously the add to cart, the buy button is the main attraction there.

Andrew Hellmich: For sure. Cool. All right. What else is on your list?

Alex Vita: Well, the homepage is a big one. With older websites, I often see that the homepage has become like a dumping ground of stuff, like I've talked to all new bits of content, new promotions, your new services have all been added to the homepage over time without any sense of purpose. So photographers need to be disciplined enough to take something out when you want to add something in. It's, a good analogy is, if you have a fashion brand which has a storefront, they constantly curate what's in the storefront. They don't keep adding new collections over there, they take something out.

Andrew Hellmich: That's a great analogy, because I know if a shop front started just adding stuff, it would just cheapen the shop. It would look terrible. No one would go in.

Alex Vita: Exactly, they take something out. And the reason why that's useful for user experience is you give people fewer choices. You eliminate distractions, so you'll then just notice that they're more likely to take some action basically, it just makes sense. So on the homepage, as a recap, I'd like to see a short bit of text, usually an intro text, a paragraph or a headline and a paragraph explaining what the site is all about. So it's clear when I land on your website and I don't know who the photographer is, and then entryways into the most important sections of the website, whether that's your featured galleries or portfolios, if you have multiple, maybe your services page or your products page, if you sell books or photo based products or anything like that, and or even the blog posts, if the blog is a big part of your website, and listing some recent blog posts there as well. So just restructure your website. Make it simpler and more organized. That's a big issue.

Andrew Hellmich: Cool. These are great. Everything you've shared so far has just been fantastic. Is there more that we can work on with intangible things?

Alex Vita: You ask it that way. Well, yeah, a few things I'd like to cover more.

Andrew Hellmich: Let's do it, yeah.

Alex Vita: One other thing is the bio, the about page. Everyone knows that a good opportunity to inspire trust. You form a closer connection to your audience. You kind of convince them to work with you. It's hard to write your bio, especially if you're just starting out and you feel like you don't have all the words or experience and so forth. Even choosing a self-portrait image is hard. Even if you're a photographer, it's close to review your own images. But yeah, that's a big thing. I'd say it's hard to write. You can hire copywriters to do that, but you're hiring a stranger to describe your life. It doesn't make that much sense. So there are articles online that you can look up to how to write your bio, how to write your about page. That can be a good starting point.

Andrew Hellmich: Cool. I've got to give a shout out to Anna Puma, because she has put together an about page generator. And I don't know if you've heard about it or seen this one, Alex, but basically you, so you fill in all these blanks, she gives you all these different options. And you know, even if you don't use it exactly as it spits out, which is perfectly usable, it gives you a great starting point, and you can go and add to that and tweak it and make it more personable and more about you, if you want to, but that's an easy way to get started.

Alex Vita: Exactly, you've touched on a good point, which is to make it more about you. Instead of using something generic, the about page is a good opportunity to infuse your personality into your website. There are other places as well. So just like you're trying to create your own photography style as an artist, you should also put some of that personality into your website. That's what I've seen most successful photographers doing well, maybe sometimes even better than all the technical stuff we covered initially. They have a good attitude, a good personality on the website. Everything they write sounds so cool, and the ways you do that is, I'd say it's design and copywriting. By Design I mean colors and fonts and spacing, how that reflects your personality, what your preferences are. They need to show on the website. It's also about the content you put out, if maybe we're going sideways a bit, but if is your website under a personal name or a business name, how you position yourself as a business, what your target audience is, the mood you set for the website? Is it joyful? Is it more classic? Is it darker? It all depends. You need to think of that how your personality is, how you can show that on your website. This will kind of inform the colors you use, the font you use to better match your style of photography, right? And aside from design, that's all design. Copywriting has a lot of power as well, because if you use the right tone of voice, that can make all the difference in the world. You use humor on your about page and other places I don't know, you dig up stories about yourself so people can relate to your work. You always sound trustworthy and reassuring when you mention your services, you sound professional. You don't sound like you're afraid to do that service. You have a good self-portrait on your about page. We mentioned that smiling, all of that creates trust and shows your personality, and it's a way to differentiate yourself above the noise of amateurs out there.

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah, no, that's true. It's funny, because you land on some photographers websites, or any website, and you get a sense of the personality of the person they've come across as someone you want to work with. And sometimes people just come across like a wet fish. It's like, Hmm, that doesn't sound like they got much personality at all.

Alex Vita: Well, sometimes photographers have a less appealing personality. It's a white lie. They need to hire a copywriter to write for them. If they sound bad, you do some testing. You get some feedback from colleagues and friends in the industry. If they tell you that this text is bad, it doesn't sound good, then maybe you need to hire someone else. Yeah.

Andrew Hellmich: Cool. All right, let's keep working. Yeah, what's next?

Alex Vita: Well, a quick thing is your contact info, it should be easy to find that's very straightforward. I can boil it down to a few principles. Is to make sure your contact page has both a contact form and your email address as a link. Some people prefer to use one over the other, and if you also post your phone number on your website, remember that can also be turned into a link. It's called a Tell Link, and that's useful on mobile devices, people can visit your contact page, they click the phone number and they call you immediately.

Andrew Hellmich: Alex is that easy to set up because I know for an email address, I go into the HTML, I type in mail to colon and my email address. Can I do something similar with the telephone number?

Alex Vita: Exactly the same instead of mail to you, just write, tell, and then the column, and then the phone number.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, and then the phone number.

Alex Vita: Exactly.

Andrew Hellmich: And is it the phone number with the area code and no spaces or just?

Alex Vita: Yes, yes. Inside that HTML code, tell:, and then you put the whole phone number with the country code and everything, and without spaces, that's ideal.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, perfect. Got it. Just quickly with the contact info. One thing that I hate is when I visit a site and I don't know where they're based. So should that go on the contact page, or should it go like on a home page? I want to know if the photographer I'm talking to is based in San Diego, Central Coast, you know, in the US, or Central Coast, here in New South Wales, where I live in Australia.

Alex Vita: That's a good question. I sometimes try to figure out the photographer's location. And for it's sometimes hard to find. I have to dig around in the about page in the seventh paragraph, yes, so just mention that on the contact page and somewhere in the about page, that's enough. Okay, I like to see it on the contact page as well. You have the phone number, the email address, and some address, your location. That's helpful from most photographers.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, I've got another question about the website layout, but let's finish with your list first, and I'll come back to that. It's about the footer area.

Alex Vita: Okay, we can cover that now if you want, it's fine with me.

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah, okay, so with the footer area, I mean that to me, seems like another pretty good place to add your contact details or some information. I mean, it's there on every page. Is that a good spot to have my email address? Or should I have more links? Like, what should I use it for?

Alex Vita: Well, usually the footer is a great place for that. It's a place for the email address, maybe the phone and the physical address as well. That's great. And sometimes footers also contain a repeat of the navigation menu at the top, but smaller, maybe, and some social media buttons. That's usually what sits in the footer, an extra option. Some people use that is to include the Newsletter Subscribe box in there. It also sits throughout the website on every page at the end.

Andrew Hellmich: Got it. Cool. All right. What else is in your list for these intangible things?

Alex Vita: Well, it's having too much information. Some photographers are too verbose. Personally, they're too wordy. So that can make people stop reading your content. It usually happens on the about page, like you see a huge bio with history and everything, you have to scroll down a lot. That's too much, because writing more doesn't always output the best results. You should try instead to get a clear message across, right? So you can't really expect people to read huge amounts of text entirely. That's not how you convince them to contact you for a project or for selling stuff. So it's again, a matter of quality versus quantity. That's why I've put this in the intangible category. It's about being brief, about focusing on just the main points that are relevant in your bio or in other texts on your website. If you do need to feature more content on your site to write more about yourself, you can always do that by breaking it down into separate pages and you just link to it, click here to read more or things like that. Instead of having a huge page altogether, it's all about readability. It's about website user experience in general. And it's not just about the amount of text. It's also about how you present a text. About readability. You need to break texts into paragraphs, to add empty lines as needed, to use lists and bullets so it's easy to skim through to highlight important sentences, you use bold for that, or headings and subheadings. So if you do have a longer page, you use all these typography tricks to make it easier to read.

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah, I totally hear you here, because nothing turns me off more than seeing a big block of text like with no spacing, no line breaks, no dot points. It's like, "Ah, this. This looks like work.", and you don't even read it.

Alex Vita: And you see how that's basically user experience.

Andrew Hellmich: Absolutely. Even in a Facebook post, if someone's got a big block of text, I'm not reading it. I'm going on to the next thing. So I'm certainly not going to read someone's bio. If it's just a big block of text.

Alex Vita: That's how people write emails sometimes. You see that in emails, because I get requests from photographers, and sometimes it's just a big block of text, just one single paragraph is just a nightmare to read through. It's just a personal taste and tidiness.

Andrew Hellmich: Do you charge those photographers more just on principle?

Alex Vita: No, no, I'm fine. I'm flexible with that. I don't judge them for it.

Andrew Hellmich: Is there anything else with these intangible things? I mean, you haven't even mentioned photos on a website. Is that a factor?

Alex Vita: Well, yeah, of course, the quality of the images is at the core of everything. That's defining factor. I like to say that the website is a multiplier of the quality of your images. If images are bad, if it's a beginner photographer, you could have the biggest feature reach websites. It still won't perform for you, because it comes down to images. And the one skill and kind of this is the last intangible stuff. Thing I want to mention. The one skill that I feel photographers need to master is image curation. Is editing down their portfolio, that's hard to do. It means letting go of the mediocre content and just sticking to the absolute images, even if they feel too few in number, it's still better to edit down the portfolio as much as possible, only promoting you're proud of too many. I feel strongly about this. Too many photographers just fill in the gaps with average content, just for the sake of it. They show too many photos in a portfolio from different angles. They repeat themselves. That's just bad. All that SEO, organic traffic that the website owner is fighting for. They're not impressed by a shallow portfolio, and it's again, quality over quantity. You want to have a visual impact, instead of that impression of being a jack of all trades, right? So unless we're talking about talk archives, about private client galleries or some sort of archival collections, then just show your best work. That's the only way to go. Usually, if you have a gallery or a slideshow for portfolio reasons, 15-20 images can impress a lot more than a large 100 image gallery of closely related shots. It just makes sense.

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah, it's even true when I'm doing sales. So with a portrait client, it's a lot easier to sell a small number of images than show them, you know, 100 images and have them try and cut it down. It just becomes a nightmare. So I totally get where you're coming from.

Alex Vita: So that's my list. That's user experience in a nutshell.

Andrew Hellmich: So just to be clear, I mean, that was a big list, and I've been jotting things down as we go. So with the technical stuff, you've got, design, typography, navigation, performance, mobile friendliness, all those things, they're things that you can pay someone to help you with if you can't do it yourself. Is that right?

Alex Vita: Exactly. Yeah, most of those can be outsourced. You hire a good web designer, or you use, I guess, a good platform that has most of those built in, and you're good to go. You need to have an expert maybe look at it. Sometimes you're too close to your own website to know the differences. But overall, the short answer is yes, most of those can be outsourced.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, and then with the intangible things that we covered after that, they're things that the photographer can work on, some of the things they could outsource, like copywriting if they need to, but the rest of it is sort of keeping it snappy and adding personality and making it easy to get around for the user, making a good user experience.

Alex Vita: Exactly. And if you look at popular photographers, which have huge followings on social media, and sometimes their websites are not technically sound. You can spot a lot of the mistakes on their website, but they have really strong images. They have really strong blog posts, so the quality all that intangible stuff that trumps everything else.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, all right, so really, it sounds like the message is, work on what you're saying and what you're showing, and then, you know, get that as good as you can get it. And then all the other technical stuff, you know, you can sort of do that. Is it? As you go, we should do it all in one hit, all the technical stuff?

Alex Vita: Well, as you go, I wouldn't say most of the technical stuff are handled initially when you first build a website, because that's when you take care of mobile friendliness, performance, typography, design in general, and all of that. But you need to keep an eye on some of them as you go, as you add more content to the website, as your business evolves, of course, but after the website is built and it's in good technical shape, then all those intangible things, that's where you should focus on. That's where the real quality is. Yeah.

Andrew Hellmich: Mate, is there anything that I haven't asked you that I should have? There's probably so much

Alex Vita: Well, I don't know. So this is basically all about user experience, and I've looked online. I wanted to really define this term really well, and I wanted to really understand what user experience means in general before we got a chance to talk now. And what I've seen is user experience has six main principles. Number one is it's useful, right? So your content should be original and to fulfill a need. That's what we've been talking about. What's on your homepage, having your contact info and all of that. So check. Number two is to be usable, the design must be easy to use. That's where all that technical stuff comes in. So the design is easy. Number three, desirable. So all of the quality of your images and all of that that kind of evoke emotion and appreciation, that's the intangible stuff. It needs to be findable. That's SEO, that's navigation that we covered, that's having a search box, if you need to, that's findability, then it's accessible. That's more technical, that's how the website is coded, and how you use all text for your images, which has SEO benefits as well. So that's user experience as well. And finally, the website should be credible. Users must trust and believe your website, and that's where copywriting and personality and most of all the other intangible stuff we mentioned. So that's user experience in a nutshell. This is kind of the last takeaway I want people to have, is they need to put themselves in the visitors shoes, right? So for every main page on a website, they need to ask themselves, okay, what are people coming to? What do they expect to find on this page? And when they land on the page, can they find that information quickly? If not, what's the fluff that can be removed from that page to avoid distractions? And once they've consumed the content, what other pages should they navigate to? Right the call to action buttons we talked about. So it's about having that awareness, that empathizing with your audience, to understand how the experience your website, and in turn, that has a lot of benefits, including SEO. That's why user experience is SEO, like we talked about in the beginning. So review your website. I get that sometimes it's hard to analyze your own website. You're too close to it, so you kind of have two options then. Say you can browse other websites for inspiration, and you can learn from them. You can kind of feel what aspects you enjoy when browsing their websites or not, like I said, easier to review other people's website than your own. Or finally, you can ask friends or colleagues just to test your site and expect back some feedback from them, and then you review that feedback and you try to spot some common patterns in their answers? That's when you know you need to change something.

Andrew Hellmich: My last question was going to be, how do you actually know? Because you are so close to your website, so you think it's okay to ask other photographers to come and have a look at the site and give them your thoughts, or get their thoughts from them.

Alex Vita: Well. Yeah, sometimes that's the only way to do it. You get feedback. You get other people to review your site because you can't analyze your own work sometimes. You might feel like your bio is written well, but people get a bad feeling from it, or your homepage contains everything you want it to be, but people are confused. What should they click on your homepage? So it's user testing. It's a big part of web design in general. Maybe it's something that photographers could tackle as well. Yeah.

Andrew Hellmich: Got it. Alex, you haven't disappointed mate, this has been an absolutely thumping big episode. You've shared so much, you've given me a lot to think about. I'm sure the listener feels exactly the same way. It's been awesome. So thank you so much for sharing what you have. I've mentioned foregroundweb.com is that the best place for people to learn more about you and what you do?

Alex Vita: Yeah, that's the website. That's where I publish all my articles. That's where they can find my newsletter. It's just twice a week. It's only about photography websites. It's kind of a mix between how to stuff, practical stuff, and business mindset changes like today. So that's it. I don't have anything else to promote. I know if I put something out there into the world in the future, it will spread on its own, I hope. But just my website and my newsletter is a good place to check me out. Yeah.

Andrew Hellmich: Well, and I can absolutely vouch for the content that you put out. Your newsletters are fantastic. They're always full of information. I love how you have the Q and A email going out once a month so anyone can ask you a question, and not only do you answer in the Q and A email that goes out, you normally reply to the photographer as soon as they ask you, and then you add it to the newsletter for everyone else. So you give so much.

Alex Vita: Exactly. I'm an inbox zero kind of person, so I reply to all emails 24 hours or so, yeah,

Andrew Hellmich: Yeah, I can vouch for that you are so fast at getting back to me whenever I email I have an issue, and I just wanted to say, you know, you give so much to the photographic community. The things that you share, I can see would be what other I guess, coaches and people teaching this stuff would be charging for, and you just give so much of it away, mate. So yeah, it's so good to know you, and it's so good to know that you're out there and sharing what you do. So and again, a massive thanks from me, Alex.

Alex Vita: Happy to be here, Andrew, and I hope this was all useful information, and I hope they put it to good use. It's not enough just to have access to information, to podcasts like this, one or two articles, they need to act on it as well.

Andrew Hellmich: Absolutely, mate, I couldn't agree more. That's one of the things I say all the time. I said this program would just, this show would only be entertainment, unless you take action. So yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. Thanks, Alex. We'll talk to you soon.

Alex Vita: Thanks. Bye.