AB and site design

This was an interesting read for those photographer selling stock and are trying to  finding art directors who will love your website and portfolios. 

Take a look at what they think within this post and maybe it could set you on a roll?

http://www.epuk.org/The-Curve/604/photographers-websites

Posted in Chat on January 17th, 2010 by admin | | No Comments »

Protected: Marketing your website 2

Posted in Chat, Photography How to on January 16th, 2010 by admin | | Enter your password to view comments

Marketing your website

One of the things with a many photographers websites is that they don’t do what they should, if you split down the basic requirements of your photography website and looks at this as a blank uninteresting  chore then you can really see what you need to do.

What you need to do is view your target market.

Many people build websites which are not targeted to the market that they aim to get with the website,  it maybe that over time your site has grown and therefore has mixed in other elements. Keep your website for one market only. You can always add  another website for other areas of photography and DONT Link the websites together, let it make it on its own.

What are they looking for?

When people search the internet, they use the words that they need to use to head for the content they want.  This goes with the above that the client wants to land on the right page, with the right information on it.

You have to hit the right buttons in between 3 and 5 seconds of a visitor coming to your website. If you have designed your website and pages correctly then you should be able to  do do this, if you view the website marketing posts that have been made it will give you some details as to the design and how this effects people.

Website marketing  post one  -http://weddingphotographyuk.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/wedding-photography-marketing/

Website marketing  post two -  http://cityphotography.wordpress.com/2010/01/07/wedding-photography-marketing-2/

There is also a third post  here – http://cityphotography.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/wedding-photography-marketing-3/

Getting traffic – You DONT want this

In this postI found online I saw that this was the usual viral posts where photographers are selling books on hwo to do it, well I agree with a lot of its content there are some mistakes to its logic.

 Most people think of things this way, the more people I get to my site the more customers I will have, or  the more links I get to my site the higher my  website will rank..  Both are WRONG.

It is quite simply wrong because  the more links and traffic to your website doesn’t mean anything;  its all about  how many visitors can I get to turn into clients or purchasers, as for the links, well they need to be good quality links that are relavent to your site and your business.

Twitting -

This has gone a little far and is OTT and twitter has died a death because of it, just ask yourself how many times has twitter came up in search results online in organic results?? None?
This postfrom Webpronews goes into a little of the twitter problem, and you can see I have posted my views which I will stand by. If you have a twitter account all that happens in that  other business will follow you and youre ending up in a sort of link farm. they arent that good, as you could be bouncing around twitter for weeks before you come to your website.

Blogging -

Now with blogging you get a whole new ball game when it comes to selling.  Blogging offers real pages and content, looking at the defined SEO requirements this can be achieved better on these sites more than others…

And I will tell you all about it in our members section…http://www.nationalphotographer.co.uk/members-area/

Posted in Chat, Photography How to on January 16th, 2010 by admin | | 1 Comment »

The National Photographer directory

For those of you entering your details on the national photographer directory you may have found that you get no acknowledgement from the site to confirm your login details. This is quite simple, you didn’t read the post regarding the way in which you have to carry out the log in and  enter your details.

The National Photographer  UK photography database  was hacked during the summer and we are about to renew the directory along with this website update.  We are unsure if we will keep the details or start a new directory.

We do offer our  apologies if you have to enter your details and sign up for a  new secured directory but we want the website to be enjoyable and we lost the data as the providers  we found out do not back up the data correctly. Now with GTWCMT’s help the systems are all backed up on a regular basis.

 If you would like to go into the directory  that’s currently online once again please contact us and we will send you the details that you will need to create the account and to add your details.

The online directory will be renewed over the next coming months as we  go through the mountain of work that we need to do and are doing on the websites. 

Is going on the National Photographer directory worth doing?

Yes, we have over 300,000 hits on the directory every quater, and it certainly puts your website in perspective, and the site grows and are page rank climbs so will your website. You can find out more on the links page in the photographer section.

Will the data entered now  go onto the new directory?

Unless we keep the directory  then the data will not be transferred, the problem came from a third party service provider that did not carry out the correct security measures on there hardware that lead to the security breach.

What did the hackers do?
They were  white hat hackers and changed the coding of the directory to flash up messages and a link to their website. We tracked the Turkish person via our logging system. National photographer is often targeted by hackers  especially during the school holidays. Within two days we had corrected the main damage to the site and enter some of the details back on the directory, but we haven’t touched it since then… something they  didn’t know about our directory

Posted in Chat, Network updates on January 16th, 2010 by admin | | No Comments »

Trash the wedding dress

National Photographer have a Trash the Dress website which was launch in the summer of 2009. With the idea of fun photo shoots in your wedding dress  and maybe getting those shots you dare not get on your wedding day?

Trash the Dress is not always about  having to bin the dress after your photo shoot,  we  have loan dresses  for those who are worried about a little dirt or maybe a tear, but having your wedding dress in a box never too be seen again, why not make two days use out of it, or go for one of our bridal boudoir shoots as well?

Head over to our trash the dress website where you can find out the details of a trash the wedding dress photo shoots or head over to our trash the dress blog.

Heads up!!

We are traveling out to Prague this summer for a trash the dress photo shoot, why not mix your dress trashing photo shoot with a short break?  Information on the  Prague trash the dress shoot can be found on this link We will be getting some  high fashion images as well, so if you were unfortunate not to book us for your wedding photography why not bride your other half along to re shoot your personal wedding photos in a stunning back drop.. that will make people talk .. maybe..

Posted in Trash the Dress on January 16th, 2010 by admin | | No Comments »

Boudoir Photography

National Photographer opperates a boudoir photography services ar various locations across the UK.

Visit the boudoir photography website for more details on the services or visit the boudoir blog

On the boudoir photography website you will find  bridal boudoir photo shoots and special offers in the promotion page of the blog. Remember if you book your wedding photography through National Photographer and some selected wedding photographers you can get 30% off your  Bridal boudoir photo shoot or with some packages its free.

Could you be looking for a Bridal boudoir Photo shoot for your first years anniversary gift of paper?

You can select to have  your bridal boudoir for a special gift on your wedding day or for a special gift of paper, rekindle the memories and dust off that wedding dress.

Posted in Boudoir Photography on January 16th, 2010 by admin | | No Comments »

Protected: Wedding Photography Growth

Posted in Chat on January 16th, 2010 by admin | | Enter your password to view comments

Wedding Photography

As many photographers and wedding venues know, there has been a down turn in wedding bookings this year caused by the recession. I came across a forum where the brides were talking about old wedding photos on the websites and that they didn’t like this.

We have been watching the wedding photography market with our eyes wide open over the last few months as we havent really been in the market for wedding photography this year with the R&D that we have been doing.
We are aware that there has been a drop of around 40% in weddings and also a growth in Wedding photographers.

At the start of the recession we had a number of ‘photographers’  who had been made redundant from pie factories and had a keen interest in photography and wanted us to take them on, needless to say the quality of the photography was not very good,  and they all seemed to be from other trades and at best were keen armature photographers.

We checked out the online stats  of wedding photography when we were looking at the boudoirr photography market and published our finding on line.

When we looked at people searching  “wedding photographers” we looked how these compared and also on the information we had from our client base.

Here is part of that post which relates to the  wedding photography market as of the 10th of December 2009.

Wedding is dropped 20% from its peak for 2009 .. If  I look at the data yearly and average them out a little then give the drops, you can see the difference. 
2004  70%
2005 76%
2006 85%
2007 79%
2008 62%
2009 50%

Highs and lows

Peeks 3Q  2004 and 2006

Dips 3Q 2009 (joint 2004 and 2007)

I will let you draw your own summary from the information I have provided, the information clearly shows some dropped  over the years and also shows how the market floats around within the year, some photography markets are down and have progressively been this way over the past few years with a drop in 2007 and some peeks in 2006.

I will go into some detail on the years and the levels of social standing and how they have effected the market.

2004  70%, This was the year that house prices started to rise and people were getting married, most people had job security and of course credit cards which they lived by.
2005 76% Most people thought that this was the peek of the property prices and many people took on loans against their homes for refurbishments and also for lavish weddings.
2006 85% This was the peek of the housing market with many people  making around £100,000 money on their home and lead to a peek in weddings from older couples who had two homes and a greater disposable income A lot of people we buying into the property market at this time, but later in the year the buyers dried up..
Not only relating this to houses and percieved wealth, Nikon and Cannon  brought out the affordable  DSLR camera to the general public and aimed their marketing directly at them, so we could see in 2007 and 2008 the weekend photographer with high quality cameras.

2007 79%  In 2007 no body know what there house would be worth and the market became shaky with house prices leveling out and the market generally slowing. Uncle bobs with their cameras started showing up in there hundreds and there were more photographers than there were weddings in many cases.
The average wedding had  at least 4 people with either professional or semi professional SLR cameras and those Look alike cameras like the fuji 9300.
2008 62% In 2008 we entered shaky ground as the banks foreclosed and shut down, the wedding market took a big breath and the businesses hard struck (advertising companies) started calling around all the photographers looking for those who wanted to place an over priced advert.  As 2008 went on the world suddenly turned dull as peoples homes were losing money and people started loosing their jobs and we started to see prices shoot up on the basics.
Olan mills closed its doors and many of the venture photography franchises closed.
2009 50%  When we walked into 2009  many people had lost their jobs, many businesses had shut down, people saw the boom times in 2006 and 2007 and had purchased their cameras and wanted some of the wedding photographers pay for their work, in fact there are 35% more photographers than there were in 2007 and with the recession in full swing there were 40% less weddings.

Without needing to say much, people are less happy when they don’t have a job and money becomes tighter; with the drop in these sectors putting stress on couples it was going to lead to more breakup and less weddings.

At this time many people  are settling into the recession and budgeting their lives for the “down turn” as we roll back the growth in the economy. There is still some uncertainty but people are coping and this means that the wedding market is turning back towards a small and slow upwards trend.

Oddly it is some of the UKs areas which are known for the low wages and considered generally poorer that have seen the most growth.

Within the members section I will continue this post with the trends on Internet users and what they are looking for.

Posted in Chat on January 16th, 2010 by admin | | No Comments »

National Photographer Goes Mobile

The National Photographer websites can be a little big for those who are using their mobile phone for searching the net.

We are trying out a plug in for the site which will enable  mobile users to view the websites, and those who use the Iphones.. havent taken a look at it yet, but I have been told that the wedding photography website looks real nice.

Posted in Network updates on January 16th, 2010 by admin | | No Comments »

768 wedding photos

With the recent relaunch of our wedding photography service, Wedding Elegance by National Photographer we have been working hard on the website  to add the content for this years and next years couples that will be getting married.

The new site introduces more wedding photos and also album design previews to help clients see how their wedding photos may look inside one of our stunning wedding albums.

Currently there are 768 photos of weddings and wedding albums on the website for you to browse. However;  due to the amount of information and photos from weddings we have, we have off set the posts which currently date back to nearly the end of Feb. You may not get to see all the photographs just yet but you may have to keep going back to the website for an update. 

We have added more wedding  albums  which can be seen on the website, making the selection that more simple. But on a side note to the wedding albums, did you know that we never limited the album selection available for our clients, so you could have any wedding album in the world!

We have put back the slide show videos on the website allowing you to sit back and relax to watch full screen wedding videos and see the joyful wedding days of our clients. We hope they don’t make you cry as many of our wedding client have done so.
Just like the wedding slide shows, the slideshow have been stagered to post across the next few weeks.

The wedding photography website will give you lots of information on wedding venue reviews, as well as give you information on the photography and how us professional wedding photographers do are thing.

 Go to the  Wedding Elegance Wedding Photography website.

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Posted in Network updates, Wedding Photography on January 15th, 2010 by admin | | No Comments »

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