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|| SportsShooter.com: Member Message Board
Good Read: The Changing Face of Photographer Websites
Diego James Robles, Student/Intern, Photographer
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Athens | OH | U.S. | Posted: 5:37 PM on 10.06.09 |
->> This article, currently on the front page, is truly fascinating. It's incredible how our profession changes and evolves every so often. Thanks Mr. Sanschagrin and SS. As somebody that is getting ready to graduate and face the real world, this article really made me reevaluate my personal flash website. Moreover, after hearing several Photoshelter reps over the years tell me that I should make my photographs work for me and be as SEO friendly as possible, maybe this is the time to go back to HTML.
I am curious to know what other professionals think. Feel free to contact me off-list if you're more comfortable.
http://www.sportsshooter.com/news/2300 |
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Matthew Sauk, Photographer
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Sandy | UT | United States | Posted: 5:42 PM on 10.06.09 |
->> it was great article.
The thing I find funny is that within the past year here there was an article that stated that no one wants to read your blog or something to that affect.
Funny how that tone has changed so quickly... |
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Allen Murabayashi, Photographer
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New York | NY | USA | Posted: 5:56 PM on 10.06.09 |
->> Matthew,
Let me explain myself since I wrote that article.
It's really difficult to build a regular readership for a blog because 1) people are busy, 2) you don't update often enough, 3) you're not a full-time writer.
I didn't argue against having a blog, I argued against viewing it as an online journal where you felt a burden to write a masterpiece. Instead, I think that a blog is a fantastic SEO machine, and every time you do a shoot, you have new material to blog about, and link from your blog to your archive.
The most successful non-personality blogger I know of, posts a new gallery at least once a month, and has HTML links back to his archive. As a consequence, Google sees this as "signs of life" with strong backlinks, and all his stuff gets indexed. |
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Brad Mangin, Photographer
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Pleasanton | CA | USA | Posted: 8:55 PM on 10.06.09 |
->> I am super happy with my new site:
http://manginphotography.net
I am excited to be trying something new that will help my business. |
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Mark Loundy, Photo Editor
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San Jose | CA | USA | Posted: 9:59 PM on 10.06.09 |
->> Sometimes the madness does end.
Bravo Grover!
--Mark |
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Clark Brooks, Photo Editor, Photographer
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Urbana | IL | USA | Posted: 12:44 AM on 10.07.09 |
->> Diego:
The first thing you should do is decide how hard you want your site to work for you and design it around that purpose. While the design has varied over the past ten years, my philosophy is a website - personal, professional or imagefactory - should be:
1. Dynamic
If you want something more than a glorified online yellow page ad, your content should change or appears to change regularly. Update your main page weekly, monthly, daily....whatever. Blogs integrated on to the front page makes that easy. Think about a website you've visited once, then a week or two later - may be a month, and the content generally appears the same. How often have you been back after the first two visits - and how regularly? A dynamic site, especially the main page, gives the viewer a reason to check back on a regular basis and solidifies your brand/style/talent with each visit of a viewer.
2. Caption and keyworded
Every image should be caption and keyworded. Most people will dismiss this as too much work, but 1/3 of my site referral traffic is via google/yahoo searches. I just checked and google has indexed 256,000 pages from my site (http://www.iphotonews.com). Interesting because there are only 22,400 images on the site, but because the pages they are displayed within are generated dynamically it looks like we are enjoying a broader and more generous indexing with Google and a greater opportunity for potential clients to locate the images they are searching for.
3. KISS
(aka: keep it simple sh*thead) Keep the page design simple so pages load fast, site navigation easy to find/use, avoid pop-up pages. Fast is good.
4. Xpost
Something I started experimenting with this summer was cross posting story teasers/photos on MySpace and FaceBook with links back to the original asset, gallery, page or the homepage. The few times I did this from events I covered, traffic exceeded expectation. I've also dabbled with Yahoo!'s Buzz and DIGG, both also have can increase site traffic, but my study has shown FaceBook and MySpace to be the best venues thus far.
5. Finally, if you want to make your photos work for you, you have to get them online (captioned and keyworded, of course). You can have thousands of great pics, but they will not make you a dime sitting on your hard drive or in your DVD archive. Like Brad, you want to make as many of the images you can easily accessible to editors and potential clients.
Don't know if this will help you, but it will give you something to think about as you overall your site. |
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Phil Hawkins, Photographer
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Fresno | ca | usa | Posted: 5:35 AM on 10.07.09 |
->> Grover's premise is great, and I agree with his points, but I would like to hear more about how this "shadow" site logistical process works.
I had an experience with one of my clients who retained a firm in Atlanta for SEO, and that gal established a "shadow" site for him and Google penalized him severely. He went from coming up consistently on the top two pages on his most important search terms (a Yosemite National Park property management firm) to being nowhere in sight. In heated discussions with Google personnel it was learned that one of Google's most-hated SEO practices was shadow sites, or as it was termed, "mirror" sites. (Is there a difference between the two? I admit I don't know...) In my client's case, he had an HTML site to begin with, NO Flash at all, and the shadow (mirror) site cost him dearly in position. Maybe this is the difference, shadow sites in conjunction with Flash, I don't know, but I would definitely like to hear Grover's discussion of how he addresses Google's hatred of two "sites" pointing to the same URL. I'm sure I have lots to learn about this subject, but given my experience w/ my own client, and with all due respect to Grover's obvious success in doing it this way, I'd like to hear clarification. God forbid someone moves to Photoshelter and Google says "GOTCHA" to the whole she-bang. Grover's an obviously smart guy, and I can't argue with his success, but I'd just like to hear how he addresses that issue with Google and what the "safeguards" are in jiving with Google's proclivity to penalize efforts to subjugate it's search algorithms. To be clear, I'm not throwing rocks at Photoshelter or LiveBooks or Grover, but I am curious how this issue is addressed.
Great, great article with lots to ponder about how to optimize the effectiveness of one's website. |
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Grover Sanschagrin, Photographer, Photo Editor
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San Francisco | CA | USA | Posted: 11:55 AM on 10.07.09 |
->> Phil - you're correct in that Google doesn't like sites that play games in an attempt to "game the system." If the site appears to be doing this in any way, even the slightest, and they find it, they will penalize you for it.
PhotoShelter doesn't do this at all because everything is already in HTML, so there is no need. liveBooks is Flash, so they need to do this in order for Google to see them.
liveBooks does this correctly, though, in that they are not misrepresenting the content. They are simply proving a different text-based layout to the content that's already present in the Flash-based version. Because of this, there's not really a problem.
Some people make the mistake of adding more text, or more keywords, or different text, or different keywords to these shadow sites, and that's a big no-no.
Also, Google is technically staying on the same page as any person would be because liveBooks is using Javascript to detect if the user has a Flash plugin installed. If not (and Google's crawlers don't have it installed) you'll see the alternate text-based version of the site.
So nobody is being redirected anywhere, which is good.
liveBooks does this right, but as you've already seen it is very easy to get it wrong. So be very careful about this. If you simply must have a Flash-based portfolio website, make sure you choose a product or designer that has taken the elaborate steps necessary to create an HTML shadow site the right way.
Or, just go straight with an HTML site and never worry about it at all. |
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Phil Hawkins, Photographer
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Fresno | ca | usa | Posted: 1:19 PM on 10.07.09 |
| ->> Thanks, Grover, for the clarification... Food for thought, to be sure. |
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