Dude, Your Online Photo Portfolio Sucks
I’ve been browing through my local photographers looking for family portrait photographers and wedding photographers. As someone who is very familiar with the web, I’m always struck at how poorly some people do their web portfolioes.
How Do They Find You?
Like anything, the most important thing about a photography site is how it ranks on google for location + keyword searches.
- http://www.google.ca/search?q=ottawa+photography
- http://www.google.ca/search?q=ottawa+wedding+photography
- http://www.google.ca/search?q=ottawa+portrait+photography
I’m sure that ottawaportraitphotographers.com does quite well when it comes to new clients finding them via Google.
The Good
I chose my wedding photographer because he uses a blog to display his pictures. The pictures are big enough that I can see the quality, there isn’t anything hiding the images, and enough pictures load all at once that I can get a good indication that I want to see more without having to click on each individual photo. Blogs also have the added feature where I actually can tell that the photos are recent work. With some sites only the hairstyles give any indication of when the photo was taken.
There were a few Ottawa wedding photographers who use this approach of having both a blog and a flash-based gallery, and I have to say I was impressed with all of them.
- Mike Dickson – Ottawa Wedding Photographer blog (flash site)
- Byron Brydges – Ottawa Wedding Photographer blog (flash site)
- Andrew Geddes – Ottawa Wedding Photographer blog (flash site)
The blogs are photo galleries all on their own. None of them mix personal blog posts in with the photos.
The Bad
One of my biggest pet-peeves with photo gallery sites is having to click on each individual photograph to load it. It isn’t so bad if I can middle-click on them to open them in a new tab to look at later, but with some flash- or javascript-based sites it takes forever! I have to click on each individual picture, wait for it to load, look at it, then click again… it ends up taking 20 times as long to view the entire gallery vs a blog-based sites.
If you use a flash-based site for displaying your photos, it has to be FAST. Use something like SimpleViewer instead of coding it yourself.
Another pet-peeve is when the pictures aren’t big enough to see the photo in detail. Thumbnails are great for overall navigation, but it’s very hard to tell photo quality when the picture takes up less than one fifth of my screen.
The Ugly
One of the worst things I’ve seen is watermarks embedded in the image. We all understand that you don’t want other people to steal your livelyhood, but much like how digital rights management shouldn’t prevent people from watching a DVD, the embedded watermark in a photo shouldn’t prevent your potential customer from seeing how good your pictures are. I can’t appreciate a photo when the writing on top of them is too distracting.
Of course, it’s even worse to have blurry photos in your portfolio. Thank you, but if I wanted an out-of-focus shot I could do it myself.
I hope if there are any amateur or semi-pro photographers in the audience they can learn a few things about what customers are looking for.
Delicious Links – 20 links – blogging, programming, ruby, photography, copyright
This is my weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together for my blog on Internet Duct Tape.
Subscribe to Internet Duct Tape using RSS or using email.
- [BLOGGING] Feel Free to Steal My Content, zenhabits.net
- ZenHabits goes open source
- [BLOGGING] My next book: the story of blogs, wordyard.com
- Scott Rosenberg’s next book is the history of blogs
- [BLOGGING] What Are Your Anti-Memes?, smoothspan.wordpress.com
- Some thoughts on the type of articles one of my fav tech bloggers usually skips over.
- [CODE] Let The System Design Itself, gilesbowkett.blogspot.com
- From the article: ” 1) runs all the tests, 2) contains no duplication, 3) expresses every idea you want to express, 4) minimal number of classes and methods. When you work with these rules, you pay attention only to micro-design matters.”
- [CODE] Rich Programmer Food, steve-yegge.blogspot.com, via:news.ycombinator.com
- Why programmers need to know how to write a compiler. I really enjoyed reading this one.
- [CODE] Valued Lessons: Garlic Programmers for Silver Code?, valuedlessons.com, via:news.ycombinator.com
- How can you measure programmer productivity when the biggest factor is the code base they are working on?
- [COMMENTS] Reading Apptitude Questions rather than Captcha, lemurcatta.org
- Interesting idea: prove that the reader read the article before posting a comment.
- [GAMERS] 18 Undiscovered Websites Every Gamer Should Know, dailybits.com
- Some cool stuff in there, like the indie game awards
- [LIFEHACKS] Let Me Save You $40: Here’s How to Be Happy, enfranchisedmind.com, via:codinghorror.com
- 7 things you can change about your outlook to life that will greatly improve your enjoyment of it.
- [LIFEHACKS] New RescueTime Goals and Alerts Actually Helps Rescue your Time, blog.rescuetime.com
- RescueTime now has goal tracking so you can limit yourself to checking feeds for only three hours a week, for example.
- [LIFEHACKS] The Five Browser Shortcuts Everyone Should Know, codinghorror.com
- Have a better experience surfing the web with these shortcuts. There were a few I didn’t know.we
- [MEDIA] What My Kids Tell Me About The Future of Media, avc.blogs.com
- A look at how children consume mass media
- [PHOTOS] A Savvy Approach to Copyright Messaging, powazek.com
- Cool trick to add copyright notices to your photos without having to worry about people seeing them unless they’re trying to copy them.
- [PHOTOS] Namexif (Rename EXIF Photos), digicamsoft.com, via:noheat.com
- Rename your photos by date. Uses the info from your camera rather than the file date.
- [RAILS] 10 Alternative Ruby Web Frameworks, rbazinet.wordpress.com, via:lazycoder.com
- [RAILS] How to ruin a Rails project, dataconstellation.com, via:labnotes.org
- How many of these have you done?
- [RAILS] Ruby on Rails Handbook, railshandbook.com, via:virtualhosting.com
- Tons of cheatsheets and tutorials
- [RUBY] TreeTop, treetop.rubyforge.org, via:blog.zenspider.com
- ruby extension to make it easy to create new expression grammars
- [WORDPRESS] WordPress Plugin: Socialize Me!, blahblahtech.com, via:dailyblogtips.com
- When people come to your blog via a social bookmarking site, it will welcome them and prompt them to add you as a friend.
- [WRITING] That to This, randsinrepose.com
- 10 tips Rands learned that made him a better writer
- Powered by Delicious Links Pro
This Week at Internet Duct Tape
Internet Duct Tape is my blog where I talk about software, technology, blogging and other geeky subjects.
- Year in Review – Most Popular Posts of 2007
- Year in Review
- My Favorite Albums of 2007
- New Year’s Resolutions for 2008: release my “Best of” lists in the beginning of January, not at the end of January.
- Yahoo Pipe: Sub-Reddit Feed Filter
- Popular social bookmarking site Reddit has announced a great new feature: users can create their own sub-reddit. What does this mean in English? Users and communities can create their own social bookmarking sites around specific topics: blogging, wordpress, specific programming languages, etc but…
- How to Play Downloaded Videos on Your iPod, Xbox 360, or DVD Player
- I’ve been slumming through the support forums at answers.yahoo.com lately and this is a question I see come up often: how do I download a video and put it on my electronic device? More and more consumer electronics devices that can play videos, but that means we have to learn more about the big,…
- Delicious Links – 20 links – writing, programming, javascript, jquery, testing
- Tags: javascript, jquery, programming, writing
This Week at IDT Labs
IDT Labs is where I announce new software I’m working on.
- [PIPES] Filtered Technorati Recent Mentions
My Filtered Technorati Recent Mentions pipe works again. It can give you an RSS feed of the latest blogs that links to your blog. - [GREASEMONKEY] Userscripts.org Popular Scripts v0.2
Updated my script for identifying the most popular Greasemonkey scripts on userscripts.org
Tags: blogging, copyright, lifehacks, photography, productivity, programming, ruby, rubyonrails
Best of Feeds – 23 links – programming, music, photography, psychology, rails
RSS feeds are like cookies (that are good enough for me). Best of Feeds is a weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet this week. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together on Saturdays. I don’t blog on the weekend so read these links instead.Subscribe to //engtech to see this every week (or get it by email).
- [STARTUPS] Building a .com in 24 hours
- Walk through of building a website with Ruby on Rails
- (dominiek.com 1325 33 1924 )
- [SOCIALSOFTWARE] The Art of the Sign Up Page
- analysis of what makes a great sign-up page
- (turtleinteractive.com 496 30 21 )
- [PHOTOS] Stuck In Customs
- really awesome photo blog
- (stuckincustoms.com 343 100 )
- [MUSIC] Music business lessons
- (sethgodin.typepad.com 326 100 31 )
- [COMICS] 17 Sensational, Free and Downloadable Graphic Novels
- Mostly DC first issue TPBs
- (dailybits.com 315 10 37 )
- [CODE] 6 Reasons to develop your tests first
- Article on test driven development. I love the graphics in it.
- (lispcast.com 142 2 )
- [MUSIC] Best of Bootie 2007 CD
- 21 track bootleg mix CD
- (bootieusa.com 126 95 7 )
- [GAMERS] 15 Minutes of Fame: Noor the pacifist
- Interview with a WOW gamer who doesn’t kill anything
- (wowinsider.com 58 28 1624 )
- [CODE] No Matter What They Tell You, It’s a People Problem
- Ouch, but true. Biggest predictor for doing good work is how much you like the people you’re working with.
- (codinghorror.com 46 14 5 )
- [COMMUNICATION] saying more by saying less
- How to nip flamewars in the bud
- (slantsixcreative.com 39 22 )
- [TECH HUMOR] Why It Won’t Work
- a look at sony’s new digital music offering
- (scalzi.com 38 30 4 )
- [LIFEHACKS] Interesting Uses of Camera Mobile Phones To Stay Productive
- Camera phones are everywhere, use em.
- (labnol.org 36 29 2 )
- [BLOGGING] Don’t Just Have a Blog – Learn to Think Like a Blogger
- Good analogy with losing weight… you have to change the way you think
- (problogger.net 33 7 10 )
- [CODE] Billy Martin’s Technique for Managing his Manager
- ack, good advice.
- (weblog.raganwald.com 30 3 )
- [COPYRIGHT] Gaming the Creative Commons for Profit
- What you need to know about how creative commons photos can be used against you.
- (danheller.blogspot.com 28 9 )
- [CODE] Just when you think you’re the only one suffering…
- Why rails is hurting ruby, and why corporate programming sucks vs hackers
- (feyeleanor.livejournal.com 11 )
- [OPENSOURCE] An Utter Disregard For Freeloaders
- quote: If enough demand for the feature exists, the feature comes into existence. There’s a tautological nature to it that makes it very clean and neat. Supply and demand are so closely linked as to become almost indistinguishable.
- (gilesbowkett.blogspot.com 7 )
- [PHOTOS] Photo Products to Watch in 2008
- Memory card that includes wifi adapter to automatically upload when the camera is on, and magnetic picture frames so you can easily swap photos in your house
- (commoncraft.com 6 4 )
- [CODE] Is Programming Like Music or Engineering, and Must it Be Unintuitive?
- (smoothspan.wordpress.com 6 )
- [BLOGGING] performancing awards | Performancing.com
- Best blogs of 2007
- (performancing.com 5 24 )
- [CODE] 9 Tips for the aspiring Emacs playboy
- tips and tricks for emacs kung-fu
- (lispcast.com 4 )
- [GOOGLE] How To Get Your Data Out Of Google Web Apps
- In light of the Scoble Facebook data portability, how easy is it to get your data out of Google Aps?
- (webomatica.com 2 2 29 )
- [BLOGGING] 40+ Social News Websites You Can Use
- Lots of niche social networking sites I’ve never heard of that might be good sources of traffic
- (doshdosh.com 19 14 )
Legend
- saves – number of people who bookmarked on http://del.icio.us
- inbound links – number of blogs who linked to it (max 100)
- diggs – number of people who dugg on http://digg.com
This Week at Internet Duct Tape
- 9 Ways to Know When to Jump Ship at a Startup
- For the last couple of months I’ve been plagued with wondering if I should stay at my current startup. I’ve been approached with a few different job offers that I haven’t followed up on, and maybe it’s time I pursued greener pastures. In the words of the Clash: should I stay or…
- Online Survival Guide: 9 Tips for Dealing with Idiots on the Internet
- Winter is one of the worst for flame wars because environmental conditions make people more irritable and more likely to spend more time online. Here are some tips for navigating online discussions from someone who has been participating and managing public forums for over 15 years.
- Best of Feeds – 20 links – geek, movies, blogging, programming, xbox360
- geek, movies, blogging, programming, xbox360
This Week at IDT Labs
- [WORDPRESS] Category Resizer v1.0
- WordPress Category Resizer 2008/01/02 – v1.0 – BUGFIX: newer versions of WordPress.com broke this script – BUGFIX: will run on any WordPress install, not just WordPress.com – BUGFIX: now works when you have less than three categories – added automatic update check – Tested with WordPress.com…
- [WORDPRESS] Comment Ninja v0.5
- Comment Ninja v0.5 2008/01/02 – 0.5 don’t display comment ninja in mass-edit mode, since it doesn’t work on that mode wordpress.com added avatars to the comment display and they were being sent in emails on multi-author blogs it grays out the comments you can’t edit IDT Labs is a…
Tags: development, mp3, music, photography, photos, programming, psychology, rails
Best of Feeds – 13 links – photography, business, photo, copyright, comics
RSS feeds are like cookies (that are good enough for me). Best of Feeds is a weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet this week. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together on Saturdays. I don’t blog on the weekend so read these links instead.
Subscribe to //engtech to see this every week (or get it by email).
- [SOFTWARE] Lifehacker’s 2007 Guide to Free Software and Webapps
- Huge list of free software
- (lifehacker.com 1763 100 )
- [STARTUPS] Will it fly? How to Evaluate a New Product Idea
- from the guy who brought use blogger and twitter
- (evhead.com 808 100 )
- [RAILS] Secrets of the Rails Console Ninjas
- tips for making the console part of your workflow
- (slash7.com 485 45 25 )
- [MOVIES] A special “Where’s WALL-E” edition of Why For?
- A look at how Pixar reuses their characters between movies… things you’ve never noticed
- (jimhillmedia.com 365 100 666 )
- [GIFTS] Lifehacker Gift Guide 2007
- Some gift ideas
- (lifehacker.com 274 49 91 )
- [SOCIALNETWORKING] The Next Social Network: WordPress
- Blogs as social network hubs
- (gigaom.com 231 100 539 )
- [PHOTOS] NWYH Stock Image Library
- Royalty free business related stock photos…. with a twist
- (nwyhstockimages.com 186 75 38 )
- [CAREER] You Are Self-Employed
- Even if your an employee, you’re still working for You, Inc.
- (stevepavlina.com 184 42 )
- [XMAS] Pagan Orgies to Human Sacrifice: The Bizarre Origins of Christmas
- It’s not the birth of Christ, it was to distract pagans from having orgies.
- (cracked.com 78 39 )
- [XKCD] Authors@Google: Randall Munroe
- A video talk by the guy who does XKCD
- (youtube.com 66 89 10 )
- [COPYRIGHT] Why Lane Hartwell is wrong
- Photographer gets popular viral video taken down after her photo appears for 1 sec.
- (mathewingram.com 7 63 )
- [FACEBOOK] Do Facebook Groups Mean Anything?
- Are facebook groups a valid way of measuring interest in… well.. anything?
- (web1979.com 4 3 )
- [COMICS] Passive Depressive
- New web site for passive depressive
- (passive-depressive.com 3 )
Legend
- saves – number of people who bookmarked on http://del.icio.us
- inbound links – number of blogs who linked to it (max 100)
- diggs – number of people who dugg on http://digg.com
Tags: business, photography
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