Comments on: Online Photography Portfolios: Answering Your Questions

By: Wayne Ford

Wayne Ford — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:22:28 +0000

Denver Engagement Photographer

Very good point!

Wayne

By: Denver Engagement Photographer

Denver Engagement Photographer — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:41:43 +0000

You kinda left out that a large reason to update your site often is because google will see the update, and come crawling more often. It figures out the patterns of how often you update, and it crawls your site based on those patterns. Update more often and google comes a looking more often.

By: Alex Hofford

Alex Hofford — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:46:04 +0000

When I redesigned my website back in earlier this year, I spent a lot of time and effort putting together the portfolio section (in Flash, alas). The blog section was tagged on as an afterthought.

Since then, according to Google Analytics, 90% of my site visitors got to blog, leave comments etc, whilst only 10% go to the portfolio page (http://www.alexhoffordphotography.com/node/6)

Ho hum...

By: Wayne Ford

Wayne Ford — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:06:27 +0000

Hi Doug,

This is a tough question to answer, because you should be looking to continually grow your audience. That said, within a month or two of your sites launch, and assuming you are using analytics, you should ideally start to see consistent patterns in visitors numbers and frequency, location, etc, and be able to benchmark your site against sites of a similar size.

This information will help you make decisions about how you can improve on your visitor numbers in the future, which parts of the site are working and which areas could be developed, for example identifying pages that are popular, from those which are not, which pages are users bouncing or exiting from, etc, the more information you have the greater chance you have of increasing visitor numbers.

And from there, look at what changes to content could be made, such as removing the images recording the lowest hits and replacing with new work, or look to utilise other methods to drive traffic to your site, such as Twitter or maybe a blog.

Its very much an ongoing process.

Wayne

By: Doug Pruden

Doug Pruden — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:23:15 +0000

Thanks for the affirmations on the benefits of optimizing the web site. Makes the work seem worth it. It still takes time to get noticed, though. In your opinion, how long (assuming that a person has followed your suggestions) do you estimate it usually takes for a website to hit critical mass in terms of traffic that are actually prospective buyers?

By: Wayne Ford

Wayne Ford — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:50:46 +0000

Thank you Jonathan, will give your idea some thought and put something together, it actually ties in quite nicely with a suggestion from someone else. Wayne

By: Jonathan Worth

Jonathan Worth — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:09:51 +0000

Thanks Wayne - another great post - would love to hear about 'a job in the life of'- from concept to delivery and all the decisions (like which photographer and why) along the way.