Website Building Sprint

September 27, 28, 29, 2024

Learn how to build a Landing Page for your photography business, and for your clients.

What is a landing page?

It is a single-page website full of information for potential clients to discover through SEO.

A Landing Page is designed to deliver the maximum information possible, on a single page, with no navigation from that page other than to your website, or your sales offer. I will explain more deeply below

SEO – Search Engine Optimization – is undergoing serious changes due to the advent of AI and its ability to search deeply and quickly.

Back in the day of music on CDs and waiting for movies to come in the mail, SEO was borne of words that would attract interest.

If you wanted someone to find your website, you would fill it with “keyword” so that the search engines would find it.

Let’s say you were a fashion photographer in Shreveport. You would fill your copy with the keywords “photography”, “Shreveport”, and “fashion”. These were the terms that would hopefully be used when a client was looking for a fashion photographer in Shreveport.

For whatever reason they would be searching for that.

And, basically, that was what we all did and it served us well all the way up to about three years ago, and then more recently about last month or so.

SEO could make or break our operation. We bowed to it, we excoriated it, we had a love-hate relationship to it.

But we did it consistently. We built it into our footers, page descriptions, image descriptions, meta-tags, and everything we could.

But now, AI is looking deeper.

And we have to do all that stuff as well as make sure the page has information that Google (and Bing, etc…), see as being valuable for the searcher.

And as close to a relevant search as one can find.

Photographers, unfortunately, are not big on lots of words on their websites.

“We let the images speak for themselves”, is a great way to have them be muted and unheard since search engines do not look at images, they track words.

This may change in the future, and there are some signs that it already is being used in places like Amazon Photos and Google Photos. But it’s probably going to be a while before it gets to the general population.

So what do we do?

We get a landing page, and we design it to make it do what the search engines want it to do.

The first thing we do is to name our page for the search terms that we believe we want to capture when someone is looking for what we do.

Let’s say that person searching for a fashion photographer in Shreveport goes to a search engine, most likely Google, and decides to input their search.

“Fashion photographer in Shreveport” gets entered.

And all the logarithms kick in and the SEO of your image descriptions and such get indexed and all that magic behind the scenes takes place, and that photographer’s page…

Doesn’t come up.

Yeah, that happens a lot.

We can do all the work, use all the right words, and all the techniques that we have available, but it still may be lacking.

(“Well, why don’t they just look for John, since he is the Shreveport Fashion Photographer?” Good question, but the answer is simple. If they already know that John exists, they don’t have to Google for the category, they simply google him.)

But here’s something to think about.

What if John had a webpage titled: Best Fashion Photography in Shreveport with a site URL of www.bestfashionphotographershreveport.com

Google will see that fast.

And at one time all you had to do was create this address and “forward” it to your website.

Yeah, that is not working so well now. (You can do it once, but more than one becomes a negative for your ranking.)

But if that page has a few interesting things that make that page informative, and you have done all the traditional SEO strategies that we normally do, your chance of being seen is much higher.

So we build a site to reflect what Google wants to see:

Learn how to build a sitemap for a high quality Landing Page.

Learn how to build a wireframe for a high-quality website.

This will be a fun, fast, and incredibly full course.

We do it as a sprint, so you can move fast and get the page built and working for you.

 

The fee is $165.

WEBSITE DESIGN SPRINT, SEPTEMBER 27-29, 2024

I am teaching a Website Building Sprint for the weekend of September 27, 28, 29, 2024.

We start Friday evening, then have meetings on Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon, and Sunday morning.

During the class, you will build and launch your Landing Page as well as learn how to:

  • Plan a website project
  • Create a sitemap (first illustration above)
  • Create a wireframe (second illustration above)
  • Work with WordPress and DIVI to design the aesthetics of the web page
  • Use the best SEO tools to help the page be found
  • Maintenance and updating tricks to keep the site fresh
  • Design trends (typography, colors, animations, scroll effects) and how to use them
  • How to test the site
  • Creating headlines, copy, and keywords to help the SEO
  • … and more

We will be using a site-building application, DIVI, that is available for a 30-day money back guarantee. You can use that to build your site, and if you decide to use another tool, what you have learned will be applicable.