Going Live – Vagabond Photography’s New Website

As some of you our loyal clients and followers are aware a few posts back we had stated our intention to build a new website though a new host provider.

The time has come and we are happy to announce we have launched our new website design with our new host provider Squarespace. It took a little while longer than expected but after many nights of research, and some consulting we decided this was the best place to make our new home.

It is a little sad that we had to leave our website provider of the past eight plus years but it was necessary. Nothing against the fine people over at Zenfolio, they were always there any time of day to lend assistance. Even at 2 A.M. in the morning when we came home to an email stating something was wrong with a gallery and a lovely bride couldn’t order a second large sized print for a family member. The glitch was fixed within a hour and for that we will always be grateful.

Now on to hopefully better and bigger things. The learning curve was quite easy with Squarespace and the 10 or 14-day trial period before you launch was great. It allowed us to get everything rebuilt how we wanted it and to have it feel like it represents who we truly are and not just being stuck to a certain template for each page or gallery where you were
plugging in information and photos.

We would encourage our clients and readers to check out the new website and play with it a bit. Please tell us if there is something you do not like, or something which really bugs you. This way we can address any issues that may arise when making a major change. can always email us or leave us a comment attached to this blog post.

http://www.vbphoto.co/

We hope everybody has a great week.

Believing in yourself and finding new opportunities at taekwondo camp

     Over the weekend we had the joy of taking Vagabond Photography on the road to Steven's Point, WI and teaming back up with our friend Alyssa Fencil. Our project destination was a taekwondo camp hosted by Five Rings Martial Arts with special guest Rio Olympian and part of Team USA, Stephen Lambdin. It was a great multi day event and being able to be a part of it was enlightening and fun as always.

I always say you need to love your job and if you love your job it will never feel like work. Covering events like this is what I mean by it. To be around so many energetic people who want to be where they are at that point in time is really eye opening and refreshing. I cannot say enough about the owner of Five Rings Martial Arts Steven Decker and Olympian Stephen Lambdin. Watching them work with students from the ages of six all the way to the mid 40’s, one can see they believe everything they talk about and it’s not something they do because they feel they have to. The one on one time and direction is something truly amazing and you can see when what they say is actually getting through to the students. At the end of the day, through Stephen’s talks and workout/training sessions, everyone was able to come away with something to help them become better.

“Believe in yourself and at first if you fail you have to get back in there and try again” is one thing I took away. Another is “It is okay to lose. It lets you know what you need to work on.” That second part is something that is vital I think to most photographers. This is something we should remember when we enter into photographic competitions and don't place as well as we think we should. It’s not that we are horrible photographers but it shows us there are parts of our craft that we need to work on.

In the end the best memories from this weekend’s events are the laughs, the sounds of feet meeting outstretched pads, and the few bruises or badges of honor (which I was sent a photo of earlier today) that we take away until the next time we gear up to do it again.

Follow your dreams

Following your dreams and committing to your goals.

     Over the weekend we had the opportunity to help our long time client and good friend Alyssa along her way to do just that.
     Alyssa is an accomplished Taekwondo athlete with hopes and aspirations of going on to bigger and larger tournaments with the possibility of qualifying for the 2020 Paralympic Games in Tokyo. The one thing we cannot help admire about her is a while back she was diagnosed with MS(Multiple Sclerosis) and that hasn’t slowed her down one bit. 
     We wish her all the best along the way.
     Below is a few of her photos from her session. If you want to know more about her you can follow her journey at her Facebook page Alyssa F.

Leaving our online home: Switching website providers

Leaving our online home: Switching website providers

For a while now I’ve noticed diminishing clicks on my website vbphoto.co and it wasn’t easy at first to understand why? Nothing has really changed I still add new and updated photos ofclients and updated projects but the metrics were just not there anymore when studying my Google Analytics sheets.

So I started to do an investigation on why this may be. I have always been good at my keywords, SEO and Metadata but still could not understand why when I Googled my company I was way, way, waaayyy at the back of the list if you typed in Milwaukee or Greater Milwaukee Senior Portrait, Family Portrait or Corporate Events Photographer/photography.

Currently for my website I use a host company called Zenfolio and I think they are great, for photographers. Also my clients have told me they like the ease of use of the website when using a computer. In addition, if you are just starting out they offer many different package levels from beginner to seasoned veteran. Also, they have basic templates so if you do not understand a lot about website design it is relatively easy to set up. There are a few pit falls with them but, hey, no company is perfect and these small things will probably get resolved in time.  These few pit fall are in relation to their blog design and mobile site.

After going through a few web tutorials about SEO on Youtube and a few other blog pages I learn that Zenfoilio as great as they are, are terrible at SEO. I spent a slow afternoon trying to figure out if this is something that could be easily fixed. Unfortunately, it is not. I can add more keywords to my photos, and on my text based pages. Though this only goes so far.

The real problem stems from URL’s on my website. For most web sites you want your URL to read as simply as possible.
For example, one would ideally like their gallery too ready like this:
-vbphoto.co/gallery/people/portraits-bw/-
The problem with Zenfolio is your links tend to look like this:
-vbphoto.co/p493259340/h74baf075#h74baf075-

I learned the second link is horrible for spider bots on the web to be able to index your site properly. The reason behind this is there is no words that would indicate to the bot this is either a gallery, a photo or a page with text. It also does not help to promote your brand online using your keywords that these bots probe the web for. If I understand it correctly. Also Al Anderson Photography blog post explains Zenfolio use a # instead of / which also causes some problem with bot crawling because it considers them as page markers not URLs. If I understood his blog post correctly.

So that right there is the major problem for why my website does not appear sooner in the results when searched by Google or Bing or Yahoo as I would hope for. Potential clients tend only to look at the first two pages it does not help that I am back on the fourth to tenth pages.

The plan now is to find a new web hosting venue and say a sad goodbye to my long term host at Zenfolio.com. Vagabond Photography will still remain the same but we will just have a new website provider. The URL will remain the same so my clients will not have to worry about looking for us under a new website address.

Currently we are looking at a move to Squarespace or WordPress. Both seem to have their ups and downs. I currently use WordPress for my company’s blogging needs which is great. I really like both of their mobile phone site capabilities they are both easy to use and navigate around.  Over the next couple of weeks we plan to make this change and we will let your our readers and customers know what we choose and how we like the new platform.

If you our valued readers and clients had recently made a switch I would greatly like to hear about your experience and why you chose your current provider.

Turn the screen off & treat it like film Challenge

A little Challenge: Turn the screen off & treat it like film

I went out in the city of Milwaukee last night to scout a few locations for an upcoming session and I noticed a few other photographers out and about doing their thing and having a good time.

The one thing I noticed though, is almost everyone out there was looking at the back of their cameras on the LCD screens to see if the photograph was the way they wanted it every time they clicked the shutter button. It got me thinking I started with film, moved too digital and now I do the same thing, it's kinda interesting how the times have changed. Also, it’s a little sad, because there was a time we could not see what our images looked like until we developed the film and then went into the dark room and created out prints or had that dreaded W store develop our prints for us. I do miss the darkroom some days.

So what if we found a way to turn that little screen off or temporally black tape over it so we cannot instantly see the result to know if we have to shoot it again or not? Think of it as getting it right in the camera without the instant gratification like we used to have back in the film days.

I’m not saying to do this right off the bat on a payed gig but on a test/fun session just to see how things turn out. I’m willing to bet the first time or two we might need to go back and possibly try again or modify it in Photoshop or your current editing software more than you needed to over just looking at it on the screen. I think in the long run it would give us a more intimate understanding of our cameras and accessory gear.

Give it a try for one or two fun sessions I encourage you and I will try this myself to only look through the viewfinder and not at the LCD screen on the back, wait till you get home to see if you got it right like in the days of film.

I would love to see what you come up with right out of the camera leave a photo in the comment section below.

Best,
Tim Gumz