Because digital images have radically changed the photography industry by allowing a Orange County photographers work to be seen over the Internet, today, a professional photographer must take into consideration the functions and effectiveness of his website. This article offers a number of questions that a professional photographer should ask when creating a web strategy.
Will he offer online digital proofing? While it may seem that in this day in age a photographer must offer online proofing, many do not do so because they want their clients to come into the studio that they can have a face-to face-sells session with the photographer. Online digital proofing is usually less work for the photographer but the size of the orders is often smaller than what would be available for a person to person sells session.
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If the OC photographer decides to follow the digital proofing model he must ask himself he would rather host his own site and manage the ordering task, or if he would rather turn that task over to someone else. If he does it himself he will have more control over the site and he will keep the fee a vendor would charge. However, by going with the vendor he will save himself some time. This decision often comes down to does a Newport Beach photographer have more time or does he have more money?
If the Laguna Beach photographer decides to host the online digital proofing site himself he needs to ask himself if he would rather hire a designer to code a site for him or use one of the out of the box packages. Normally a larger studio would want the uniqueness that comes along with a customized site. However, smaller studios often struggle to pay the expense and because of this cost decide to go with a prepackaged digital proofing site.
Besides a proofing site, a photographer should also consider having a site that advertises his work. Similar to a proofing site a wedding photographer should ask himself a number of questions to decide the site that would work best for his particular business. He should ask what type of site best meets my online marketing strategy. Will I be blogging frequently? What type of site best fits my brand?
After a photographer has decided on the type of site he will build, he should then decide what where he wants to host his site. This is important because if the makes the wrong decision up front and finds that the hosting service he has gone with does not meet his needs, he will suffer a costly and timely process when he decides he would like to expand out his site and finds that the hosting service he has chosen will not meet his needs and that he must migrate his site to a new service. Thus to avoid any costly migrations he should ask up front: how large is my business likely to grow? How much bandwidth will I likely need to service my site? How many pictures will I likely need to load at any given time?
The industry in which a photography business competes is crowded. Therefore a photographer, whether he is a wedding, pet, senior or destination photographer should think carefully about his website strategy and make it a competitive advantage for his business.