00:00:00               Welcome to the hair of the dog podcast. I'm Nicole Begley. And today we are talking with Alex<inaudible>, who is from foreground ground web, and he has been developing, designing and helping photographers with all aspects of their website. For the past 13 years in our conversation today, we are deep diving into the biggest myths of SEO. Talking about how to design your website,

00:00:27               to have great user experience. What you really need to worry about for SEO, all the different tools and tricks and tips that he has to help your website look the best that it can be. We have a great conversation for you guys today. So stick with me and let's geek out over some website details. Stay tuned. Welcome to the hair of the dog podcast.

00:00:49               If you're a pet photographer, ready to make more money and start living a life by your design, you've come to the right place. And now your host pets, photographers, travel addicts, chocolate martini, connoisseur sewer, Nicole Begley. Hey everybody, Nicole here from hair up the dog. And today I'm very excited to have a special guest Alex Veda from foreground web,

00:01:13               and we are here to talk all about SEO, web design, and all important web things to welcome Alex to the podcast. We're so happy. Hi Nicole. Thanks for having me here. Happy to be here as a pet owner myself, I'm happy to speak to other pet photographers. Nice. Excellent. What kind of pet do you have a cat that only has seven lives left,

00:01:41               jumped off the balcony at 1.8, a mouse, a toy mouse, but she's still here though. Goodness. Oh, well, I'm telling her to be careful with those last two we want Or sticking around for awhile. Yeah, Well, yeah, it's so great to have you here. Alex said for, for you, for those of you guys out there that don't know him,

00:02:02               his website, gosh, you can help people with so many different things which we'll definitely get into at the end. But one of the things that you are very good at is web design and then all of the SEO and getting websites found user experience and getting websites to really work for the clients. So one of the things I hear most regularly is, Oh my gosh,

00:02:27               Nicole, I need help with my SEO. What, what are the SEO things? I just they're so focused and tunnel vision on SEO, SEO, SEO, but we were chatting and you actually have a little bit of a different, a different opinion there that SEO is maybe not the very first thing that you need to worry about on your website. Is that right?

00:02:48               That's completely right. Let me preface this by saying that I, I know SEO. I know how powerful it can be, so I'm not fully against SEO, but I got kind of annoyed maybe with so many photographers reaching out to me, obsessed about ICO. And that's why I kind of put an SEO review in my list of services out of sheer market demand.

00:03:17               But when I went and visited their websites, they had huge mistakes, ugly websites, outdated copy of broken links. You couldn't contact them for, you know, not narrowing down their portfolio. It was a massive a website and they were still obsessed about getting traffic about bringing more eyeballs onto the website. What for that traffic with just wouldn't convert, right?

00:03:43               So it's just, it's, it's a shallow, it's not the best target to aim at when you have bigger fish to fry on your own website. Absolutely. Yeah. I like to tell people too, you know, even if you are getting referrals from amazing clients that have had a great experience and love you and they tell their friends and their friends are like,

00:04:03               Oh my gosh, I'm so excited. And they go to your website, they're still going to your website. So your website has to be able to serve people because what, who does business without checking out someone's website first, even if they're referred to you, they're still going to be going there to see what you're about. It's so, so, so important that we have websites that actually serve our,

00:04:26               our business and serve our clients and therefore convert for us. What are some of the biggest mistakes, I guess, that you see people making on their website design? Well, I'm a big problem is with how they structure their website, especially with the navigation menu B being really, really confusing either they're using too many menu items. Basically the navigation menu becomes a dumping ground of all of their pages using dropdowns or not.

00:04:58               It can still be a mess or being overly creative with those menu items. Like you don't know what they mean, actually they they're trying to use clever names for their pages. Instead of just saying about or bio or contact my experience skills working together. I clever stuff that's creates confusion more than anything. That's one mistake. Then you have the common missing location.

00:05:28               You don't know where they're from, what area they cover, especially, you know, pet photographers are a service based business. You're, you're selling services. You're selling yourself as a photographer. Of course, through your art, you can only cover a certain location, a certain area. If you, why don't you say that it's, it's shallow to think that people would just get in touch with you to ask.

00:05:52               No, that's small roadblock keeps them from working with you. They trust you. You have that. You have, you know, poor design. You have, you still have splash pages. It's still a thing. Like you end up on a homepage and it's just one single image and a big button that says, enter website kind of blows my mind.

00:06:14               It's a user experience. Nightmare. Yeah. And flash those flash websites. They, you know, they aren't good for SEO either. Right? Cause it's just one image. Like there's no copy for Google to find on there. And yeah, yeah. Fortunately flash websites are, think are gone these days. I don't see them anymore, which is good.

00:06:37               And most templates and platforms for creating websites these days are mobile friendly, which is good. You can no longer find a template or a, or a WordPress theme or whatever. That's not mobile friendly, which is good. Whereas there are kind of different levels of mobile friendliness. That's another thing. I mean, it's, it's one thing to load. Okay.

00:06:58               On mobile and another to have a good experience on mobile for everything to reflow and shrink accordingly. Not just to work. Right? Yeah. That's another thing. Yeah. Well, and Google has put more emphasis on having a mobile friendly websites in the recent years. Right? So you can even get penalized if your site is not mobile friendly. Is that right?

00:07:23               Yeah. Yeah. That's true. They put a lot of emphasis on it and photographers can actually see how much of their traffic is coming from mobile and tablet and Google analytics. There are other tool which I really like, which is Google search console, another free tool from Google few photographers use it. Although I think it's really, really useful. I don't really need to go on this rabbit hole too much,

00:07:48               but Google analytics tells you how your, your traffic, how your visitors are behaving on your website. How much time, how many pages and so forth. Whereas Google search consult tells you what they're searching on Google to find your website through which keywords they found you, which is a different set of information. And over there, it's mobile first indexing. It's the mobile traffic takes priority over there.

00:08:17               So it's, it's really important to have a good experience on mobile. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I like the, the keywords is a good thing that just thought of came up for me too, is as pet photographers, we are. So, you know, whatever genre you are, if you're another genre listening to this, but we're so close to our genre that we just assume everybody's searching that photographer,

00:08:40               Charlotte pet photographer, Pittsburgh pet photographer. A lot of they're not even using the term pet, which the Google search console will help you find out. I recently looked up cause I was rebuilding my website. So I was wanted to check those search terms. And dog photographer was searched way more than pet photographer. And then I searched horse and equine. And I,

00:09:05               I forget, I'd have to look. I think I'd have to look, but equestrian photographer was like none. But anyway, it was that Google search console. I hadn't messed around with it too much prior than to a couple of months ago. I've discovered it. And there's just so much great information there. Yeah. There are a couple of mistakes I see photographers do when it comes to keywords.

00:09:27               What you're talking about, one is using phrases with photography instead of photographer, which is not the case for this particular niche. People are looking for a photographer to help them to shoot photos of their pets, not for photography because those, those queries are generic. People are maybe only looking for dog photos to use in their editorial stuff. They're not looking for a service provider.

00:09:56               So they should use phrases that end in photographer at the end. So dock photographer, pet photographer, and so forth. And the other common mistake is people obsessing over the, the top keywords, the ones with the most competition for them while ignoring long tail keywords, all the possible variations that you could use that includes using your location. So, you know,

00:10:21               North Carolina, pets, photographer, and variations of that dog photographer in North Carolina, just an inversion or using adjectives like a creative doc photographer, best doc photographer, or a studio photos of dogs, or all sorts of variations, just using natural language, spreading those out naturally throughout the content that covers all the possible variations that people search for that you cannot match with just the top four.

00:10:54               Yeah, no, that's great advice because I think it, a lot of people myself included back when I started to learn about long tail keywords, I'm like, well, that makes sense for a wedding photographer. It like, felt like it was easier, but we have a lot of opportunities for that too. You know, especially depending where you're shooting,

00:11:11               you know, you could probably put in, you know, downtown Charlotte, dog photography or Lake Norman, dog photographer, you know, start putting in those different things and work in our areas as well. Like our actual locations that we're shooting. So I think we just assume that as a wedding photographer, you're like, Oh, I have the church and I have the reception spot and I have a florist and I have this and you have all these things that you can start to pull together,

00:11:38               but we have that too. We just have to look a little bit harder for it. Yeah, that's true. And maybe photographers are thinking that going more narrow with the keywords, brings them less traffic, right? The long tail keywords don't attract as much traffic, but that traffic is more targeted. There there's a match between their search intent and what you have to offer.

00:12:05               So they should convert better. You should get a better results from that traffic. Even if the numbers are lower, it's, it's a change in mindset. Yeah. I love that. And I can imagine too, it would be really important if you're in a big market like Los Angeles or New York city where there's a lot, there's a lot of competition,

00:12:24               even in a smaller niche, like pet photography for New York city pet photographer that, you know, you could drill down to more areas and really focus on those long tail keywords. Yeah. W at that point, if the market is really saturated where you are then just using long tail keywords might not even be enough. You might need to further specialize as a photographer to carve a smaller niche for yourself.

00:12:50               Like only doing studio portraits, only doing a beach portraits of dogs or whatever, because it's hard to, to fight the competition. Just, just the ratio. Yeah. Yeah. What are some of the things? Cause I know people are sometimes impatient and they're like, I have my website. Why am I not number one on Google? What are some of the,

00:13:14               I'm thinking one in particular, just that we can't short change, which is time. Right. So is that still an important factor in starting to get your, your website a little bit more notice on Google and what do you mean by time? Like how long you've had your website length of time for your website to be up The age of the website?

00:13:37               Hi, I don't think it's, it's a ranking factor directly, but usually through the age of the website, you gather more links, more back links from other websites to yours. You get more traffic from social media. If you invest time in that. So it's not a direct, but age usually comes with experience and putting yourself out there as a photographer,

00:14:01               online, many things contribute to SEO photographers. Obviously they want, they have image heavy websites. They want to impress visually, but they kind of ignore text content on the website. And the minimum would be to just write something on the homepage, not just have a slideshow. And that's it kind of at least some sort of tagline or a statement of what the website is all about that helps both visitors and Google.

00:14:30               And then adding more texts to, to the website in general, the portfolio pages can have a description as well, kind of a gallery description of what, what they're all about. Not just images blogging, of course, which is in the bigger bucket of content marketing photographers. Don't do that as much because I think they, they kind of have the wrong idea of what blogging is.

00:14:54               It's not an online journal. It's not something shallow it's. If, if you aimed at helping your audience like writing useful educational content for your target clients, how they should prepare before, before a pet photography session, do you need props for a photo session? Is it better to shoot indoors or outdoors? Great venues for shooting horses, a lot of educational content.

00:15:25               Those are our gold for both attracting more traffic to the website through SEO, but also when they land on your website and they see that educational content and they learn from you, they trust you more you're again, this is a service-based industry. They need to trust you. And if you, if you teach them something, who will they work with? Yeah,

00:15:48               Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I think people get so hung up with blogging. The same thing I hear for email marketing, where they just are like, well, I don't know what to say. I don't know what to do, but if, and so they default for the blog. It's like, well, I'm just going to share some work.

00:16:06               And that's not really an effective use. As you mentioned, to be able to educate your client, figure out what they need to know. I was like to ask myself, okay, before the session, what do my potential clients need to know before they book me? What do they need to know after they booked me? What do they need to know to prepare for the session?

00:16:24               What do they need to know to prepare, to choose their images? What do they need to know to prepare, to have artwork on their wall? There's so many different things we can do. And one also thing that I, another thing that I love to do, because I'm a big believer in SEO, social media is an awesome, I seen on our marketing cake,

00:16:44               but that main main cake part of the cake is actually interacting with other businesses, humans, our community. And do you have this great opportunity to highlight other businesses on your website, on your blog that would also bring other traffic. It makes you a community leader. It would get some SEO. If somebody Googled like Fido's bakery and you had a, a blog post highlighting Fido's bakery on your website,

00:17:15               then I imagine that would probably show up on the first page of Google when someone's Googling Fido's bakery. And then all of a sudden they're coming to your website, finding out more about you. So it's just such a, a great, easy way to just start to bring more traffic to your website and, and just want to throw this out there. Everybody,

00:17:34               when you have that, once you start to create that content, once that stuff that can live on and on and on things that are, you know, important for your actual client journey, you can then send them an email. Know if it's before the session. And you've written this blog post about how to prepare for your session as part of your workflow that you can set up to automate even,

00:17:57               Hey, I'm getting excited for our session next week. Make sure you check out this blog post. I wrote that give you all the tools you need or help you prepare so that we have a great time. Let me know if you have any questions. So, and then you can take bits and pieces of that and put it out on social media that all links back to your website,

00:18:14               which is driving more traffic to your website and round and round it goes. And, and that's a good overview of the difference between having a website that you control versus social media, which comes and goes. Plus they changed the rules on you, right? For on Facebook. You can no longer get in front of all your followers. Now you have to pay to boost to promote your posts.

00:18:36               The website is something you control and people come to you through SEO. And the examples you gave of blog posts that you could write. Those are just one category of possible articles you could do kind of in the how to category or tutorials for your clients. You could also write about behind the scenes look making of stuff, how you shoot those inspired trust as well.

00:19:05               You could make clicks lists like top 10 venues for something those usually attract more traffic. You could resource lists. You could make a list of your preferred venues or companies or florists or whatever. Yeah. A lot of them, I love it. So many ideas. You guys pause this, rewind, write it down. And I don't ever want to hear any one of you out in hair of the dog land saying,

00:19:29               I don't know what to put on my blog. We just told you, I have the mindset of writing useful content for their audience. They don't even need to be salesy. They don't need to promote their, you don't need to put links to your services. It just happens organically. People trust you more and they check out your, the rest of your website.

00:19:48               Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Speaking of links, as one of the things I like to encourage people to look at when they're building their website or when they're reviewing their website is what kind of flow do they want from the website? So someone generally will come in on that homepage. Well, and then where do you want them to go? I see so many people that have,

00:20:09               you know, the navigation at the top, some homepage stuff. And then it just ends in the footer instead of having options at the bottom to be like, okay, now you can book your session or explore the different products I offer that would kind of lead them through the website. Is that something that you recommend as well? Or do you have a different strategy?

00:20:28               No, it's definitely something. I always encouraged to use call to action buttons at the end of pages to kind of guide people through a flow through the website. That's that's the right word, the flow. And now what flow to use actually depends on the website, but so photographers kind of have to deconstruct. So people landing on, on the homepage for the first time,

00:20:56               let's think of first time visitors, which most, most of the traffic is from first-time visitors, not from repeat visitors and those visitors, they start off with trusted zero, right? They don't know who you are. They don't know how your website works or looks yet. They're just discovering it for the first time. We could even say that trust starts at minus one.

00:21:21               They're skeptical these days. They don't have the patience to sit through long slide shows or whatever they want to get their information quickly. So what did they come for? They probably come to check out a selection of your work of your photos. So then a portfolio would come in handy. Of course, maybe they want to check prices. I'm sure that's common in many photography industries.

00:21:46               So even if pricing packages are not laid out, at least addressing prices in some way, like starting from, and then reach out to me to discuss it more. That's common as well, and then maybe their about page. And then the contact page is usually last. So kind of creating a flow through your website, using call to action buttons that maybe only one button per page one action.

00:22:15               And you can, it, it really, really works every time I've seen this implemented, it works. You can check it in Google analytics. There's a report called behavior flow. You can actually see people from your homepage, either drop off or go to the next page and so forth. It's not forcing anything. It's just guiding people through that flow.

00:22:39               They always have the navigation menu at the top in a consistent place, kind of as a buffet of options that they can control. It's just a gentle nudge to view the next page that you want them to view. Yeah. I love that. And yeah, Google analytics has a great, a great way for you to look into it. So all of you guys out there,

00:22:59               if you have a website, as you mentioned, Google search console and Google analytics are really helpful. Would you have a Google webmaster account too? Is that the same as those? Or is that something different? That they're a Google web There used to be Google webmaster tools, but that's the old name for the search icon. Okay. All right. Very good.

00:23:19               As you can see, I don't dig into the back into my website that often. Awesome. All right. Good to know. One of the things though that you can look up in Google analytics is the bounce rate for your website. So why might people want to be concerned about, Well, because it's an indication that something is not right on the website and people leave.

00:23:42               I think photographers are again obsessed about bounce rates as if it's the end. All Google has repeatedly stated that it's not a ranking factor in itself. It's they don't look into Google analytics data as a ranking factor. So it's just a sign for you as a website owner to see people are dropping off here and it could be from a number of causes either.

00:24:11               You're getting shallow traffic at the top of the website, they're coming to you from an unrelated search query. That's kind of depends on the content you have on your website, on how you did SEO before what we spoke about using photography versus photographer. You're ranking well for dog photography and they're landing on your website and you're selling services. They bounce. They're not interested.

00:24:36               There's a mismatch. That's one reason there's, there's no not a match and intent. And then they land on your website. They get confused through the design, through the navigation menu that we spoke about through how your website is structure. They don't like your photos. Of course, mediocre content And T they're at work. And you haven't used it on your website.

00:25:01               So they hurry up and close it on a plane. I think wedding photographers are often guilty of this. Not Photographers are usually pretty good. The, the one to set me as a visitor, they want to set me in the mood with that awesome lounge music in the background. And I just closed the tab, of course. Right, right. Yeah.

00:25:28               So any number of things can make people leave, but usually it's through content and through copywriting through the message, they don't resonate with what they read about. Yeah. Is there a specific bounce rate, bounce rate that you look at? And you're like, Ooh, that one's pretty pretty high bounce rate. Like I could, I should definitely look at something.

00:25:50               Is there kind of a benchmark that we should look at? Well, it's hard to give out numbers cause it really depends. But whenever I see something above 70%, that's usually a sign of something wrong. Either SEO was done wrong or content problems. I don't expect bounce rates to be too low of like below 50, 60% because it's just this distraction era.

00:26:19               People don't have the patience. So I don't expect low bounce rates in the 20% because it's just no longer that era these days. But usually it can be improved through a bunch of tweaks on the homepage. That's the most important page, how it, it's just kind of a, a storefront linking to other important sections in the website. It's not, you don't need to,

00:26:46               the extremes are bad having an empty homepage with just images or putting everything on the homepage and a huge scrolling page. And then people don't need to navigate to other pages. So kind of a middle ground. Right? Right. Speaking of load time, I know, you know, photographers have a gazillion images. Maybe we didn't set our images up for proper website saying,

00:27:13               do you have some best practices for making sure your load time on your website is reasonable. Yeah, sure. Image heavy websites always have this problem. First of all, photographers should check how their website performs and Google page speed insights or GT metrics, two popular free tools. Their image performance problems usually come from the dimensions of images. So people uploading high res photos to the website instead of what they need.

00:27:47               If, if your website template just displays photos at 15, a hundred pixels wide, that's what you should upload. Not more that's. So pixel dimensions matter more matter. A lot. DPI is irrelevant for the web. So whatever you upload to the website, it doesn't matter if you said the photos do 300 DPI or something, that's irrelevant on the web.

00:28:11               That's only useful for printing. That's another misconception. She just looked at the pixel number for the actual dimensions of pixels. Yup. Yes. Okay. Side's pixel dimensions. You have the JPEG compression level. Most photos on photography websites are JPEGs exporting photos in Photoshop, Lightroom, whatever at a hundred percent quality creates huge file sizes. There's no need to,

00:28:37               for that lowering that to 70 ish percent kind of strikes a good balance. And then the last, the third component is what your website does with the images that you upload. If you're using WordPress, there are plugins for this image, optimization, plugins, a short pixel Imagify or if you're using other platforms, they do some of that stuff. What I mean is extra compression.

00:29:05               So they do, they further reduce file sizes. They implement lazy loading, which is not needing to load all of the images on the page, straight away, only what's in the viewport and then loading them as you scroll down, generating next gen version of images. So Google now likes to see web versions of images. So in the background, as you upload something,

00:29:28               they convert all the JPEGs into another format web and deliver that to capable browsers like Chrome. And that has performance improvements. Well, so a plugin can do a lot of stuff. Do you need to do a plugin for that last thing that you mentioned or is that something that's automatically happening on the backend? Automatic and WordPress, at least not other platforms?

00:29:54               I don't think so. There might be a few platforms out there that do generate web versions, but mostly no. And in WordPress, definitely not. You need a plugin for that and image optimization plugin. They just do everything for you as a helper. Yeah. Awesome. I hadn't, hadn't heard about that particular one before, so that's awesome. If you,

00:30:14               if you test the website in either of those two tools, tools, they'll say convert images to next gen formats, and it says web P and that's just one of the optimizations they recommend. Is there a specific metric for load time that you'd like to try to keep websites under? Ooh, yes. In general, a general rule, I suppose, I should say Recently,

00:30:40               Google introduced the concept to a that's called core web vitals. It's a set of performance benchmarks and they're broken down into different categories. So I can't give you a number like the page should load in two seconds because it's, it's broken down into, you know, time to first bite, how quickly the server response with the first bit of information. And then what you see first on the screen pages don't load all at once you load part of the website,

00:31:10               is that first, the top of the page usable straight away, or does it shift around and you can't really click on it and it's annoying before the full page load. So it gets technical this one, but usually with good optimization, you can get websites to load really quickly, like one or two seconds per page. If, if you're using a good performance blogging that Cassius pages,

00:31:38               it's it can go really quick. Is it safe to say that if you're getting up to five, six, 10 seconds, that you might want to look at what's going on on your website? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. That's safe to say. And apparently performance has become a ranking factor for Google because it's, again, down to user experience. If people are,

00:31:59               are annoyed, they leave, then you notice bounce rates and lower rankings and all of that. Yeah. And a goldfish now has a longer attention span than humans. Thanks to these little, these little devices we carry around and reinforce us with all day long. Speaking of, go ahead. Yeah. That's why, when you have social media icons on your website,

00:32:22               you know, they're common. Everyone lists them, make sure they open in a new tab When you click on that. Otherwise people End up on Instagram and then two hours go by. I mean guilty. How many times, if any of us, like I need to go post something to my group. And I actually finally learned to put on my Chrome browser,

00:32:42               a little folder that have direct links to my Facebook groups. So I don't even, I bypass the newsfeed, but how many times we like, Oh, I need to go post on my page and you open up Facebook. And it's like, twenty-five minutes later. You're like came here for something. What was it? They're so powerful and dangerous. We have to take measures to prevent us from using social media.

00:33:02               We do. Yeah. I love my direct links to my pages and groups. So that way you can jump right in there. There's also some plugins, some Chrome plug-ins newsfeed Eradicator and some other things. So you open up Facebook and you don't have the newsfeed anymore. You can still go to your page or to your groups or wherever you need to go.

00:33:19               But it is quite at sanity saver. Yep. But one of the things I wanted to ask about load time and images. What about video? Is it best to have like video on YouTube or Vimeo and embed it like is there, is there just go what's the best practice. If you want to embed some video into your website? Yes. You should not upload the huge video files onto the website directly.

00:33:42               It's, it's a huge performance bottleneck and it's it doesn't load as quickly. You should, you should upload them to Vimeo or YouTube and just embed them on the website that has a bunch of advantages. It's it's instant, right? It straight away with just the thumbnail you have buffering and you have other other features. Like I don't always have the time to watch a video on a website,

00:34:04               but I clicks a watch later on YouTube and it saves it in my account. So that's a feature that you wouldn't have if you uploaded directly to your website. Perfect. Good to know. I have a quick question to jumping back to our images and you know, we talked about the size, but how important is it to have like alt text and to,

00:34:26               to describe what the images are throughout your web? It is important, especially on gallery and portfolio pages, which are image heavy. There's not a lot of texts there. You're giving something to Google, to digest. You see what it's all about? They're time-consuming if done correctly. I mean, photographers usually just do the mistake of copy, pasting the same attack in all of their images and that not only doesn't help it kind of backfires.

00:34:58               Well, what does Google see on such a gallery page? If it's looking at the source, the same phrase 30 times, it just starts to ignore it at at best. So it takes much time to write unique, all tags for all your images, using natural language, just describing the contents of the photo. It's helpful, but it's time-consuming Would you also try to put in some of those long tail keywords,

00:35:27               like if there is a dog running in the water, it's like dog photograph running in Lake Norman. Yes. That's an excellent location to include all sorts of, of words. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. And all it all needs to sound natural, natural language as if you were describing the photo to a friend, not comma separated lists of keywords. Okay,

00:35:50               perfect. Great to know. And then as far as texts, you were talking about having some texts on our portfolio page and our homepage and really all of our pages. So Google has something to look at. Is there a minimum amount of texts that's recommended? I remember hearing like 300 words in the past, but that was years ago. I don't know if that's at all accurate anymore.

00:36:11               I don't think there's a minimum. No. Okay. No, that's to have a little bit of something on there. Sense to describe it to two humans, then Google will like it as well. Perfect. Perfect. Well, I just have one more question that I think will be really, really helpful here for, you know, pet photographers that are actually,

00:36:30               maybe too, let's start with the pet photographers that have their website. It's been up for a while. What are like their first kind of action items after listening to this, this interview that maybe they should go take a look at like the most important thing to kind of just like go give their website a quick little audit. I recommend just trying to think more how your website serves first time visitors to your website that we mentioned briefly,

00:37:00               because sometimes you're too close to your own website that you, you, you know how to use it because you know where everything is, but first time visitors don't. So you have to put yourself in their shoes. Somehow when you're landing on this homepage for the first time, what am I, what am I as a client put, put yourself in their mind?

00:37:20               What am I looking for? I'm probably looking to hire that photographer. If they cover my location, my area, what, what the cost and what's the quality of their work. Do you, do you make that easily available? And the contact information? Of course, it's hard. It's hard to think like your clients again, you're, you're emotionally attached to your own work.

00:37:46               That's why it's difficult to narrow down your portfolio to cut out some of your images because again, emotional attachment, but you could ask friends, do some sort of user testing with colleagues, ask them to find some information on your website. Don't just basic user testing. Let them roam free on your website and see how they behave. That usually gives you some,

00:38:09               some pointers. It's hard to put my finger on a specific action items. That's that's good though. That's a, that's a great place to start on a little website audit. Yeah, 100%. One of the other things I would love to ask you is from the point of view of someone that is just getting ready to start their website, you know,

00:38:30               what, what kind of things should they look for in their website or a website? Yeah. Like a, you know, Squarespace versus WordPress versus all these different templates. Is there, do you have any advice for someone that's maybe knows they need to make their website and they're just completely overwhelmed. Sure. There's I understand the confusion. A lot of platforms out there and there are trade-offs my go-to platform is WordPress because I know it inside out,

00:39:00               and I know it's powerful and flexible and I can turn it into anything into kind of a unique website, other platforms, you know, Squarespace, Wix or other ones or photography, specific platforms like photo shelters, SmugMug Zenfolio and the others. They're good. They, they check a lot of boxes, but they only have usually a few, a few templates that you can choose from.

00:39:25               And you, you risk your website, ending up looking like hundreds, thousands of other photographers. So then you have to put in extra work to make them unique. Somehow to stand out with WordPress, you have the most flexibility, but it's a, trade-off you with more complexity. You it's, it's difficult. You, you need more design skills. You need some maintenance for WordPress to keep things up to date,

00:39:51               which you don't with. Squarespace where something else. So it really depends. When I build websites, I ask what they need on the website. I try to learn about their business more to get a sense, because if it's just a simple portfolio website, just showcasing a few images, some pricing packages, a contact, then you can pretty much use any platform out there.

00:40:13               They're all mobile friendly. Well, I I'm against some of them like weeks or other ones, but yeah, almost any platform because it's just a simple portfolio website. It's just an online business card. When you need advanced functionality, like you need e-commerce features to sell prints on the website or to charge session fees, payment systems on the website, or you need an advanced blog section content marketing.

00:40:40               Then WordPress is the most powerful platform. That's usually my choice, but yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. This has been so good and so much great information. I'm sure some of our listeners are going to listen to this two or three times to make sure they write down all these little great tidbits that you shared. So thank you so very much for being here with us.

00:41:03               And if you want to take a minute, maybe let people know. Cause I know there's a lot of people out in my community that know they need a website. They don't have the design skills. They don't want to, you know, I always like to say things either cost time or money. So sometimes when we don't want to spend the time to learn how to do something new,

00:41:25               we love to hire somebody to help us do something new. So if those people that are out there listening, they're like, I would like to have some help with these kinds of things. Go ahead and let everybody know what kinds of things you can help them with and where they can find you. Well, if photographers are open-minded to, you know,

00:41:41               hire an expert in another industry, just like they want to be hired by someone else. I build websites exclusively for photographers. I've been doing that for 13 years now and you can check out my website. It's at foreground, web.com, F O R E ground web.com. And that's where I list out all of the web design services I have and a lot of educational content.

00:42:06               So photographers in kind of the, do it yourself approach. I have, you know, SEO guides and all about blogging and content marketing and design. They can, it's all free on my website so they can check it out. And I'm also open to getting emails from anyone. If they have questions after this or any, any follow-up interests, they can shoot an email to me on my website.

00:42:31               That's perfect. That's great. Yeah. I was poking around your website and there's so much content on there, guys. If you want to learn more about SEO, learn more about user experience design. I mean, there's so much great content on Alex's website. So definitely, definitely go check that out and a geek out on all things website. So image sizes that we just briefly touched upon,

00:42:56               it's a huge 10,000 word article on my website. This scroll bar is so, so tiny. There's so much, so much information. So yeah. So thank you again, Alex, for being here with us, we really, really appreciate it. And everybody out there and hair of the dog land have a great week and we'll talk to you next week.

00:43:17               Bye everybody. Thanks for listening to this episode of hair of the dog podcast. If you enjoyed this show, please take a minute to leave a review. And while you're there, don't forget to subscribe. So you don't miss our upcoming episodes. One last thing, if you are ready to dive into more resources, head over to our [email protected]. Thanks for being a part of this pet photography community.