Photographers: What your website visitors really think
When we want feedback on our sites, most of us will ask other photographers or our clients what they like about our site.. The problem with that is it doesn’t give us an accurate view on improvements we need to make. To really improve our site, we’d need to ask the visitors that left our site and find out why.
An article titled An open letter to photographers came across my Twitter feed yesterday and there were almost 200 comments with thoughts from brides about photographers websites. Even though it’s about wedding photography, most of it applies to all photography sites in general.
Here a quick recap:
- Kill the music. Not one person said they liked the music.
- Flash sucks: it’s slow to load, hard to navigate and some aren’t able to view
- Pricing: most wanted at least a ballpark price to know if they can afford you.
- Location: Many don’t have the town or state where their located
- Don’t open site in another browser window
- Contact: Make your contact info easy to find
- Speed: Many won’t stick around to wait for you images to load, so size them right
Read all the comments from An open letter to photographers
I switched to a wordpress site and it’s been great. As soon as I dropped the flash, the bounce rate went from 44% to 18% in less than a month. If you aren’t familiar with that term, it means that visitors only visited one page and left. That means almost HALF of my visitors were leaving the site. The article had good insight on how photographers can improve their website. I would love to hear what high school seniors think of photographers web sites.
Photographers, what’s your biggest marketing challenge?
Category: Marketing, Social Media
Hi Nancy, I too saw the post on Open Letter to photographers and found it very interesting. I also read your last post on the wordpress sites. I do use a wordpress blog but I’m now looking at changing it to a html wordpress theme. I am curious how you handle client proofing? Do you have proofing in your site or do you use an external proofing company?
Thanks for all your great advice!
Hi Christy,
Thanks for your comments!
For client proofing I use is Photocart, here is the link: http://www.picturespro.com
It is set up on my domain. It’s a one time price then you own it. Very easy to use and set up. The cart is html too.
I have had it about 5 years now, I use it for after the sale stuff.
Just a note… It’s completely normal for a Flash site to have a high bounce rate – because the entire Flash site resides on one page – the viewer can view the whole Flash site, and not leave that one page.
Bounce rate is important if you have a standard html site – but if you’re using Flash, it’s not a metric you should spend much time worrying about.
I don’t currently have a Flash site – I switched when the iPhone came out – not being able to view my own site on my phone struck me as a real problem! But it’s always possible I may use some Flash in the future for other projects. It’s a great platform for some things!
Cheryl, that makes a lot of sense. You have a very nice site, I loved the simplicity and layout. Nice imagery too.
The iphone was one of the many reasons I switched. It seems like a lot more people are browsing on mobile.