The Best Website For Every Photographer

Squarespace WordPress Wix show it format crop photofolio photo shelter smug mug zenfolio webflow blah blah blah there are so many website choices for photographers out there that it can be hard to choose the right one for you [Music] spoiler alert I use Squarespace I use it for multiple websites that I owned I've designed about three dozen websites in Squarespace I've converted people over to Squarespace and every single time I hear someone complain about their WordPress site getting hacked or a plug-in update breaking their whole website I tell them the same thing switch to Squarespace you're not going to regret it look this isn't a sponsored video but I am open to that I'm just Evangelical about Squarespace I think it's the best choice for every photographer every photographer whether you're a wedding photographer Boudoir portraits Interiors architecture headshots what have you if you're a high-end photographer specializing in advertising editorial fashion Etc Squarespace is the site for you if you're a fine art photographer who exhibits their works and sells prints Squarespace is right for you in almost every instance Squarespace is the best choice for you not every single instance but I think 99 of the time yeah so in this video I want to outline why I think Squarespace is better than pretty much every other website platform but in particular where I make any comparisons it will be with WordPress WordPress is its biggest competitor in terms of users more photographers use WordPress than probably any other website and I want to include in that websites like show it which is really just a wrapper built on top of Wordpress a little bit of background on me before I begin I'm a commercial photographer now but I started designing and developing websites 100 years ago before the HTML 2.0 spec even existed I've built large database driven websites using Frameworks and object-oriented programming when I became a photographer I didn't want to spend any more time coding I tried WordPress and realized I'd have to do a lot of coding to get it to where I wanted it to be or I would have to hire someone else to do it but then I found Squarespace and I haven't turned back since so let me get into the reasons why I recommend Squarespace over everything the first reason is security and maintenance since this very video was inspired by my friend's call for help on Facebook yesterday because her WordPress website had been hacked and I really wish I could have helped her the first reason is security and maintenance Squarespace is a website platform with integrated hosting built on Amazon web services which means you don't have to pay extra for hosting every month and the redundancies have their own redundancies AWS servers are mirrored around the world in the 10 years I've been using Squarespace I've only seen two outages once a few years back when an entire AWS data center went down and another so many years before that that I can't even remember when it was I've never heard of a single Squarespace website getting hacked at all Squarespace has two-factor authentication set up for all their users you need to be using it and they have teams dedicated to making sure everything is always running smoothly with a WordPress website you pretty much have to look after your own charity you have to pay for your own hosting you have to install WordPress install your themes install any plugins you might want to use and manage the security of all of that on your own God forbid your WordPress site gets a virus and ends up on a security Blacklist and then potential clients when they're trying to find your website to get a warning that says this website is not safe you've lost them before they could even find you are you a website security expert no I'm not you're a photographer I'm a photographer go take some photos and rest assure that your website is safe from Hackers from malicious code injections and viruses every Squarespace website also comes with an SSL certificate that's always up to date so you don't have to manage your own security certificates either you don't have to deal with that on your own server it's also super easy to enable click Jack protection if you have a Squarespace website already make sure this is turned on go to your settings developer tools website protection and then make sure click chat protection is enabled if you're liking how this sounds so far make sure to tap that like button button and subscribe to this channel if you're not subscribed already for more videos like this reason number two is design and templates Squarespace has a wide range of professionally designed templates that look awesome and they are optimized for mobile devices all Squarespace websites are responsive and infinitely customizable allowing you to create amazing websites without extensive design skills the interface is extremely user friendly and intuitive makes it really easy for beginners to create their own websites without any previous web design or coding experience Squarespace is like a drag and drop system that's built on different types of content blocks from your standard text blocks and image blocks to accordion blocks to product blocks for selling your fine art prints scheduling blocks to book sessions through Acuity scheduling to events for scheduling workshops it's it's as easy as selecting the block type you want to add and no there is no and that's it just select the block type with the possible exception of adding embedded forms from your CRM or Studio management system or tracking pixels you'll probably never need to add a single piece of code to your Squarespace website and when you do it's super easy to just copy it from your CRM and drop it into a code block because Squarespace 7.1 is built on a universal template system there's no need to switch templates to add features change sections or remove old elements you can do it super fast and super easy and the changes are live the instant you hit publish done now there are a ton of pre-built sections that you can easily customize with your own copy and images the galleries are great for commercial photography and the list sections are great for Consumer photography Pages where you might want to highlight your services or explain you're in studio process one of the newer features that I like are saved sections you can now create a section save it as a favorite and then use that section anywhere you want your website just click add section go to your saved sections and select that section that you want to add this is great for sections like testimonials that you might want to use on multiple pages on your website but you don't want to have to recreate and rebuild on every page just save it go to the new page add the section drop it in boom done so easy reason number three is search engine optimization for Consumer photographers this is really important there is a myth out there that Squarespace is bad with SEO it's not I don't know where this comes from but I only use Squarespace websites and I consistently rank in the top three positions in my target area for my target genres hell I'm still on the first page for Toronto acting headshots even though I don't shoot in Toronto anymore Squarespace has built-in SEO features that when used properly can really improve your site's ranking every page has an SEO section that you can fill out to add metadata or adjust how your site is read by search crawlers and displayed on search engine results Pages you can add alt text for every image you upload to Squarespace and even change the name of the image at the instance level that means if you decide to use the same image on different pages that Target different keywords or keyword phrases you can easily change the name of the image to select and Target that specific keyword phrase for the that image on that page reason number four is blogging yeah blogging squarespace's blogging platform is just fantastic it's super easy which I think I've said a dozen times already uh and fully featured you can add almost any type of content block to a blog post including galleries when you're blogging your sessions and I know you're blogging your sessions right you're blogging your sessions just drop in a gallery set it to Stacked and dropped in your images give it a good title set the appropriate category and tags and publish and you're done that's it that's simple you can use a summary block on any page to pull in your latest blog posts and filter them by category and tag or category or tag or filter or featured post for example you could show your featured engagement session posts on your engagements information page or your business case study posts on your corporate headshots page or your newborn sessions on your newborn photography page separating that from your maternity photography it's as easy as filtering the summary block for those specific types of sessions as long as you properly categorize them in your blog also on Squarespace you can have an unlimited number of blogs on your website blogs plural you could set up a Blog to act as a collection of your client testimonials using the summary block you can then show those testimonials on the relevant Pages filter to the shoot that is relevant to that page so then you have you have really easy testimonials that you can just drop in anywhere and and filter them as long as they're properly categorized and tagged and finally a really great way to boost your long tail SEO strategy is by using self updating blog posts I've done a whole video which I will link to in the video description below and at the end of this video so be sure to check that out reason number five is analytics you can use squarespace's built-in analytics connect your Google analytics and Google search console accounts and monitor your traffic right from within Squarespace analytics isn't my personal strong suit I find Google analytics to be complex and overwhelming but Squarespace is analytics page makes it easy for me to understand as someone who doesn't have a data science degree finally I want to wrap up with some bonus features these are some other features that I don't think deserve an entire section on them I think they're important to mention so here are the bullet points first one integrated email campaigns I use Squarespace for my monthly emails that go out to Art buyers producers art directors and all my other contacts it's just as easy to use as Squarespace all my images are already there and the metrics make your list open and click rates really easy to understand it's it's all graphically represented domains and Google workspace if you want to get your domain through Squarespace you can connect to a Google workspace or order it through Squarespace you can personally I use a personal Google account and then I just use hover for all my domains and email addresses hover makes it incredibly simple to connect to Squarespace and I just prefer keeping these things separate for my personal Tech workflow I'll link to hover below as well and you can check them developer tools if you're tech savvy like me it's easy to connect your Google analytics UA code and create Squarespace apis for integrating with other software the URL mapping is really easy so you don't have to manage a robots.txt file you can just find the url mapping under your settings and finally importing from WordPress if you have got a WordPress website and you're thinking about transferring to Squarespace and you're worried about getting everything transferred over just go to settings Import and Export content then click import follow the directions to import your WordPress website and get a head start on building out your Squarespace website that's it for this video to see how I create those self-updating blog posts I mentioned earlier click on this video right here until next time take care