Alex Vita from Romania is a top freelance designer, developer, blogger and the creator of Foreground Web, a site dedicated to improving photographer's websites. Originally a wedding and portrait photographer himself and through the struggles of finding work Alex is now committed to teaching how to build a photography website covert visitors to clients.

Although some of todays interview does get a little technical, there is a ton of information Alex shares that can be immediately implemented to improve the effectiveness of your website with some simple changes.

Here’s some more of what we cover:

  • Your website should be a marketing engine for your business
  • What most photographers are doing wrong with their websites
  • Where is the best place to add the contact page on your site
  • An email address with a link should be available everywhere on your site
  • What style of contact form your website should have
  • 5-10% of potential clients will not use your contact form if you ask for their phone number
  • Carefully choose the required fields on your contact page
  • Which is the 2nd most visited page on every website
  • The importance of setting up your About page properly
  • Why you need to have a self portrait on your About page
  • What content should you have on your About page
  • Can you have too much text on your About page
  • Why your website copy should be written for humans and not for search engines
  • Avoid using keywords in the meta description in order to rank higher
  • When is the best time to fill in the meta description field on your posts
  • What image management tools to use for your website
  • The importance of matching your goals with the tools and functionality of your website
  • When to choose WordPress and why
  • Is it best to rebuild your existing website from scratch or just enhance it
  • How much does it cost to build a website
  • Whom to hire first? A web designer or a web developer?
  • Email signatures are great promotion tools for your website

Alex Vita Podcast Interview

What’s on Offer for Premium Members

If you’re a premium member, you should have received an email with links to your version of this episode where you can hear lots more content from where we dive deeper into some of the earlier topics plus some new ones that I pushed hard for that include:

  • Why you should see websites as an investment, just like your camera equipment
  • The website is for your target audience not for you
  • Why you need to understand who your audience is and what they want seen on a website
  • Why adding a splash pages could be the worst decision you make
  • Music for your website… god or bad idea
  • Stop making your website visitors wait for the main homepage to load
  • In terms of ranking, is it a good idea to have too many photos on your site and lesser text content
  • ranking with copy overload on your website
  • Your homepage needs to be visually impressive
  • Will the amount of text content affect site rankings
  • How your blog helps your homepage rank
  • What is a sub domain and why they are a bad idea for your photography blog
  • The biggest mindset shift photographers need to make when designing a website
  • Google considers user-satisfaction as a ranking factor
  • How to pay more attention to your audience instead of Google
  • Why you need a responsive website
  • Why you need to focus on creating a good experience for your users
  • What is an ideal bounce rate for a photography website
  • How to make your website responsive
  • Is it okay to place social media buttons on your website
  • Social media profiles should only be considered as marketing hubs for your brands
  • Every page on your website should have a clear purpose
  • What is a call-to-action
  • How to lead your visitors to certain pages on your website
  • Is it a good idea to use a video for your website
  • How to rank videos

Alex Vita Podcast Interview

What is your big takeaway?

Following this interview, I’d love to know what your biggest takeaway is – what is the one thing that you’d like to implement or learnt from what was shared? Let me know by leaving your thoughts in the comments below.

What you post online on the website represents the foreground of your actual work

If you have any questions that I missed, a specific question you’d like to ask Alex or if you just want to say thanks for coming on the show, feel free to add them below.

If you’d like an easy way to show Alex your thanks, and support for the show at the same time, click the link to create a tweet and automatically show you’re listening: https://photobizx.com/tweet

Alex Vita Podcast Interview

iTunes Reviews and Shout-outs

Each week I check for any new iTunes reviews and it's always a buzz to receive these… for a couple reasons. Firstly it's confirmation that I'm on the right track with the interviews and that they really are helping you improve your business. That's awesome!

Secondly, iTunes is the biggest search engine when it comes to podcasts and it's your reviews and ratings that help other photographers find the PhotoBizX podcast. More listeners means more interviews and ultimately a better show.

If you have left a review in the past, thank you!

If you haven't and you'd like to, head to https://photobizx.com/itunes and you can leave some honest feedback and a rating which will help both me and the show and I'll be sure to thank you on the show and add a link to your site like I have with the listeners below.

Great podcast

By Dawn Thomson Photography from New Zealand on March 4, 2015

Thanks Andrew…honest, inspiring and refreshing…Dan’s portrait work is amazing!

Alex Vita Podcast Interview

Links to people, places and things mentioned in this episode:

Foreground Web

Foreground Web on Twitter

Top 30 Most Influential Photographers on the Web

Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (3rd Edition) (Voices That Matter)

WordPress

Wix

Squarespace

Woo Commerce

Google Analytics

YouTube

Vimeo

Alex Vita Podcast Interview

Thank you!

Thank you again for listening to the show and thanks Alex for being an awesome guest!

If you have any suggestions, comments or questions about this episode, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post, and if you liked the episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of the post!

That’s it for me this week, hope everything is going well for you in life and business!

Thanks and speak soon

Andrew