Going Live – Vagabond Photography’s New Website

As some of you our loyal clients and followers are aware a few posts back we had stated our intention to build a new website though a new host provider.

The time has come and we are happy to announce we have launched our new website design with our new host provider Squarespace. It took a little while longer than expected but after many nights of research, and some consulting we decided this was the best place to make our new home.

It is a little sad that we had to leave our website provider of the past eight plus years but it was necessary. Nothing against the fine people over at Zenfolio, they were always there any time of day to lend assistance. Even at 2 A.M. in the morning when we came home to an email stating something was wrong with a gallery and a lovely bride couldn’t order a second large sized print for a family member. The glitch was fixed within a hour and for that we will always be grateful.

Now on to hopefully better and bigger things. The learning curve was quite easy with Squarespace and the 10 or 14-day trial period before you launch was great. It allowed us to get everything rebuilt how we wanted it and to have it feel like it represents who we truly are and not just being stuck to a certain template for each page or gallery where you were
plugging in information and photos.

We would encourage our clients and readers to check out the new website and play with it a bit. Please tell us if there is something you do not like, or something which really bugs you. This way we can address any issues that may arise when making a major change. can always email us or leave us a comment attached to this blog post.

http://www.vbphoto.co/

We hope everybody has a great week.

Leaving our online home: Switching website providers

Leaving our online home: Switching website providers

For a while now I’ve noticed diminishing clicks on my website vbphoto.co and it wasn’t easy at first to understand why? Nothing has really changed I still add new and updated photos ofclients and updated projects but the metrics were just not there anymore when studying my Google Analytics sheets.

So I started to do an investigation on why this may be. I have always been good at my keywords, SEO and Metadata but still could not understand why when I Googled my company I was way, way, waaayyy at the back of the list if you typed in Milwaukee or Greater Milwaukee Senior Portrait, Family Portrait or Corporate Events Photographer/photography.

Currently for my website I use a host company called Zenfolio and I think they are great, for photographers. Also my clients have told me they like the ease of use of the website when using a computer. In addition, if you are just starting out they offer many different package levels from beginner to seasoned veteran. Also, they have basic templates so if you do not understand a lot about website design it is relatively easy to set up. There are a few pit falls with them but, hey, no company is perfect and these small things will probably get resolved in time.  These few pit fall are in relation to their blog design and mobile site.

After going through a few web tutorials about SEO on Youtube and a few other blog pages I learn that Zenfoilio as great as they are, are terrible at SEO. I spent a slow afternoon trying to figure out if this is something that could be easily fixed. Unfortunately, it is not. I can add more keywords to my photos, and on my text based pages. Though this only goes so far.

The real problem stems from URL’s on my website. For most web sites you want your URL to read as simply as possible.
For example, one would ideally like their gallery too ready like this:
-vbphoto.co/gallery/people/portraits-bw/-
The problem with Zenfolio is your links tend to look like this:
-vbphoto.co/p493259340/h74baf075#h74baf075-

I learned the second link is horrible for spider bots on the web to be able to index your site properly. The reason behind this is there is no words that would indicate to the bot this is either a gallery, a photo or a page with text. It also does not help to promote your brand online using your keywords that these bots probe the web for. If I understand it correctly. Also Al Anderson Photography blog post explains Zenfolio use a # instead of / which also causes some problem with bot crawling because it considers them as page markers not URLs. If I understood his blog post correctly.

So that right there is the major problem for why my website does not appear sooner in the results when searched by Google or Bing or Yahoo as I would hope for. Potential clients tend only to look at the first two pages it does not help that I am back on the fourth to tenth pages.

The plan now is to find a new web hosting venue and say a sad goodbye to my long term host at Zenfolio.com. Vagabond Photography will still remain the same but we will just have a new website provider. The URL will remain the same so my clients will not have to worry about looking for us under a new website address.

Currently we are looking at a move to Squarespace or WordPress. Both seem to have their ups and downs. I currently use WordPress for my company’s blogging needs which is great. I really like both of their mobile phone site capabilities they are both easy to use and navigate around.  Over the next couple of weeks we plan to make this change and we will let your our readers and customers know what we choose and how we like the new platform.

If you our valued readers and clients had recently made a switch I would greatly like to hear about your experience and why you chose your current provider.

Backups, to your Backup!

So it has been a little while from my last blog post. In that time, I have learned to always make sure to have backups and if possible backups to your backup.

This applies to everything, have backups to your camera gear, editing and transportation. For example, my main camera is a Nikon D-800 and its backup is a Nikon D-300 and that cameras backup is an old film camera from the mid 90’s. For my files I backup them on external hard drives and on a cloud network and I don’t remove them from the memory cards until they are loaded on both. That way in case something happens to my files I am not out of the work I have just done for a client or for myself. As for transportation I have an 09 Dodge and that’s backup is a old tired 68 Pontiac Firebird its there if its need to but thankfully I have never had that need.

The lesson here is even though you may not be using your backup device never let it out of your reach because everything is going fine until, it’s not.  I ran into “IT’S NOT”, not too long ago.

I came home from an corporate event in Milwaukee, WI in the middle of June one night to find the black screen of DOOOMMM on my computer with a deadline looming quick. In the end we found out the video card had fried itself and took part of the motherboard with it but had left the hard drive intact with no loss of photos or business files.
It was at that point in time I realized the backup laptop was nowhere to be found. I had lent out to a friend whose computer shorted out and was waiting on a new one and need to keep their business going. So I had just broken my own rule number 1, “never let your back up out of reach because everything is okay until it isn’t.” Thanks to a local photographer friend Jeff Boomer Ernst who lent me his backup, I was back up and running the next day an able to make my deadline.
A day after deadline my backup was back and I was up and running and a few more days after that a new laptop arrived and business is back to normal.

In the youth of my business I had just committed a major foepaw and that was, I didn’t have my backup. Now I realize that for other photographers who companies are in their infancy, you may not have backups to your backup or backups in general, it can be expensive. Though it is something as you take on more and more clients, you do have to look into because if you screw up and miss a deadline or lose the work its can cost you in the long run. That client talks to other possible clients and it spiderwebs out and can cause more problem down the line. Even if you don’t really use your backups you need to have them. I got lucky and had the help of a friend and I was able to make deadline.

So I cannot express enough to beginning photographers, first to have a backup camera and second have a backup computer. If you cannot currently afford to do so make sure you have a backup plan in case the unthinkable does happen to you and that way you and your clients are not left out in the cold.

Consider joining a photography group

I’d like to take a minute to invite any photographer who is just starting out or is a seasoned veteran to be more and join a photography association or local group. A while back I touched briefly in my blog post on "Finding the right Photographer" about being part of a photography group such as PPA, WPPI, APA or others. They are a great resource to belong too if not for networking with other photographers but also as an association helping especially new photographers avoid many pitfalls we tend to make starting out. Even if you do not want to join a large national group look into join a small photographers group in your local community.

I do belong to Professional Photographers of America (PPA.com) and have been an active member for the past two and a half years. I also belong to a small group of local photographers with no affiliations to any large national group. They have both helped me out greatly when I was starting out and still do several years later.

When I made the switch from being a sports, live events and news photographer to being primarily a portrait and live event photographer these two groups were there to help me navigate some of the pitfalls that beginning photographers or photographers who have been out of the business a while normally face. With the small local group of photographers I learned how to better light my clients along with better posing practices. Then with the national group they were better able to help with setting up better business practices and creating better contracts that protect both me and my clients.

The fun thing about being with groups like these, is that after being with them for so long and getting help from so many great people, it eventually becomes your turn to help other beginning photographers become and be more.

You may want to ask the question hey where can I find these groups? The answer is fairly simple go on Facebook use the search bar and you can find plenty there. Also for the national groups other than the ones listed below you can google them or for PPA just click “here” and you can learn about their mission to help and support photographers.

Professional Photography Groups:
American Photographers Association (www.americanphotographyassociation.org/)
Wedding & Portrait Photographers International – WPPI (www.wppionline.com/)
American Photographic Artists (www.apanational.org/)

Sweet Water Clean Rivers Clean Lakes Conference

This past week was a very fun week for Vagabond Photography we had the opportunity to team up for a second time with a great non for profit group call Sweet Water (http://www.swwtwater.org/). This time we were covering their Sweet Water Clean River, Clean Lakes Conference at Discovery World on the Lake Michigan water front. They are a fun and insightful bunch of people, trying to do a wonderful thing by organizing groups and companies and raise awareness to help clean up the Greater Milwaukee Watershed to bring it back to swimmable and fishable conditions.

The reason why we really like what they are doing over at Sweet Water besides the obvious is because it gives us the ability to photograph our clients in new(to us) and cleaner locations, in the past we would of passed by because of how dirty and unsafe they were.

Also while at the convention two of the afternoon presenters were from Detroit and Toronto. They both went into detail on how cleaning and restoring/reshaping the water shed in their cities brought people back to the waterfront and revitalized the area. We think this speaks to what Sweet Water is trying doing in our area which we believe can greatly benefit people in general and especially our clients.

The other part of why we this think this is a great thing is, in being good stewards of this blue spinning marble we all live on it is our duty to keep it clean for future generations so we don’t just flush our lives down the proverbial toilet.  In our free time at Vagabond Photography we like to spend our time fishing, swimming and hiking around local waterways so groups like this have a special place near to our hearts. Having grown up around the paper mill belt along the Wisconsin River we can remember times when cleaning operations were under way we would not think about swimming or eating a lot of fish out of the river. Though now it is a great river to go out and have fun on year round. So it’s nice to see several groups trying to clean up the Greater Milwaukee watershed.

We cannot encourage people enough to go over to their website and see what they are trying to do to help clean up the Greater Milwaukee Watershed.