Learn your craft!

Being a designer as well as a photographer has it's perks! One of them being the ability to have full control over our site! From something as small as adding new content to the more complex complete site redesign! Between Caressa and I there is nothing that we don't do when it comes to our website. Our website is a lean mean SEO machine! It processes ones and zeros, and chews up spam and spits it out! We can go from sharing on facebook and twitter to tumbling and stumbling in the click of a button...or even the swipe of a finger!

But all joking aside

I think most photographers neglect the fact that their success goes way beyond the camera they choose. For most of us the first thing people see is our website. You have a few seconds to knock this brides socks off with photo awesomeness and...loading...loading...loading! Que the trombone cause you welcome them with a spinning loading bar, a blank screen, and the latest trendy love song. This is because you chose to go with a flash site...why? Because it plays music on every page? Because it has cool transitions? Because... It's not worth it! Clients want to see your work and they want to see it fast. They want to know what you shoot and how you shoot it. Why are we so afraid to let our work speak for itself? If you where having a dinner party and all the guests tell you how good you plates looked...then that means what?...your food sucked!

Get a CMS! It's all the rage on the interwebs!

But Rich what on earth is a CMS...Well young protog (my new term for pro photographer...like it?) a CMS is a Content Management System. One CMS to rule them all, One CMS to find them, One CMS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them! In other words it's a way for you to take control of your content and start to make bank off of your skills. It will be hard! It will get ugly! But it will pay off! Think about how much moola you would save if you just took the time to learn a nice open source CMS...like wordpress or for the brave Joomla (like our site). Become the master or your website...aka the WEB MASTER! You can cut out the middle man. You know the middle man who charges you every time you want to update your flash template site. But don't get rid of him...he can still be useful! Ask your web dude/dudette if they can help you with setting up a CMS, and a nice table less template. They will know what your talking about...if not...FIRE THEM!!!!

Photography is an image based business! Lets clean up our image and raise the bar a bit. In this over saturated business if you don't do it the next guy will!

Keep of shooting!

Rich Johnson

Here are some links to the CSM software mentioned above.