Lessons Learned from our Website Makeover
7 top takeaways in our journey from starting out clueless to the big reveal.
Who doesn’t love a good makeover? We sure do. And we know, we know, makeover movies aren’t exactly en vogue these days, and someday we can talk the many reasons why. But we have a soft spot in our hearts for the classics, like Clueless, The Devil Wears Prada, and of course, Pretty Woman.
The first step in our journey to a better website, was admitting we had a problem. For starters, our old was site was a lot like the main characters in the previously mentions makeover flicks — mostly white, and unremarkable. But even worse? It wasn’t getting the traffic it used to, and didn’t convey who we are as a studio.
While building our new website, we did a ton of research which included a stupid amount of articles and endless YouTube tutorials. If only re-doing your website was as simple as a 3 minute montage. At the end of the day, we learned a lot. We’re definitely not saying that our new website is all that, but its a heck of a lot better than our old one which lacked a lot of the standard features that effective websites implement to maximize their marketing potential and SEO.
Here are our top 7 Takeaways from our website makeover:
1. Clueless? A Designer Template is a Great Starting Point
Website builders like Squarespace and Wix offer no-extra-charge templates that you can utilize to help define your website’s structure and overall design. But if you’re anything like us, you want a website that reflects your unique personality and perspective. So cookie cutter templates, just won’t cut it. And since we don’t have time to learn how to build a website from scratch, or the budget to hire full-time web developer, we opted for a third option. There are designers that sell super impressive, super customizable website templates that can help give your site a custom designer look, at a more affordable price point. And of course, and in our case, an injection of excitement to finally sit down and build the damn thing.
We purchased a Squarespace template from Katie, the owner of Pearler. Katie is ridiculously talented and we really connected with her design style. Once we bought the template, it was easy to add a fresh font and our brand colors, and, or course our photography. Katie is also available to hire for one-on-one help/customization and she’s extremely fun to work with.
2. The Homepage Headline Says it ALL
On our old website the headline read “Get weird. Have fun.” We love those words and live by them. The only problem is ‘get weird have fun’ isn’t a headline at all, it’s a slogan. It doesn’t tell you what we do, or how we do it. Ideally, within a few seconds, your website’s homepage headline should clearly communicate what you’re offering, and reassure visitors that they are in the right place. It should be easy to understand and straight to the point. Check out this straight-to-the-point article from Hubspot that outlines 12 Critical Elements Every Website Homepage Must Have for more on how to make an effective homepage.
3. Words = SEO
A picture says a thousand words, right? Ugh, as if. As much as we would love to just plug in our photography and video content and let our work to the talking, the truth is we would never populate in a Google search, because, at least for now, google searches are powered by words. Based on our research, its recommend that each webpage include a minimum of 300 words. Our old site had like 10. And getting close to 300 can be hard when you hate talking about yourselves as much as we do. So adding a blog to your website is a great way to add quality content that includes plenty of words.
4. Stash SEO Keywords Inside Your Images
This one’s huge for Photographers — SEO Keywords can be added into your images through File Names and Alt Text. Not only will this optimize images in Google searches, it will also allow customers with seeing disabilities find and enjoy your photography. This was a big moment of enlightenment for us. If this is a new concept for you (like it was for us) here’s a great article from Search Engine Journal that breaks these down in greater detail and explains how to use them to your advantage.
5. Feature the Type of Work You Want to be Hired For
Our previous website mainly showed examples of our creative product photography, but not much of our art direction and video work. We love creating video content, and want to do more of it, so we made sure to highlight this more in our new Website. If you don’t have examples of the type of professional work you’d like to be hired for, personal projects can be very satisfying and help show potential clients what you’re capable of. We love this article from Creatives Lives in Progress that discusses how to use personal projects to attract new clients and features some insanely talented artists.
6. Share what makes
you unique
Shop your competitors and figure out what sets your brand apart, and why visitors should choose to work with YOU. Our lovely and talented website consultant, Jess from Spring Society, noticed that our website was missing a unique element of our creative process — practical effects. We love flexing our Photoshop skills, but we also LOVE building our sets in props in real life as well through practical effects - like this paint brush made out of cash and this bicycle we very carefully assembled with Q-tips. Big ups to Jess for recognizing that this was missing.
7. Use Original Photography + Video
Since we’re content creators we were already following this one, but we were very happy to see that experts on countless platforms advise against using cheap stock photography. The pro’s at Blue Compass put it best, “Not only can these photos feel inauthentic, but it can be a poor experience to see the same picture again and again across multiple websites. This is something Google would like to avoid showing its users.” We couldn’t agree more.
“Not only can [stock photography] feel inauthentic, but it can be a poor experience to see the same picture again and again across multiple websites. This is something Google would like to avoid showing its users.” — Blue Compass
There you have it, those were the biggest takeaways we learned during our website makeover. We still have some fine tuning we plan to apply to the site and that’s okay! If we were waiting for our website to be perfect before sharing it with the world, we’d never share it at all. And that would be a big mistake…big...huge!
