monoatomic72
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 p.2 #9 · Off season is killing me... | |
My take:
You're a guy Seriously, with the name Shannon, and the about me picture, I thought you were the girl in it. That threw me for a loop. Although that has nothing to do with getting more inquiries, I'd be taken aback with an initial meeting thinking I was going to be meeting a girl and seeing you show up. haha.
Your about me section could use some serious work. I stumbled over the sentences just reading them in my head, and could barely get through it reading them out loud.(That is a good way, by the by, to see how your sentences flow. If you can write a sentence that has a nice spoken rhythm to it, it will translate well to someone reading it.) Try and find a family member who can write decently to take a crack at writing something nice about you. Last resort I'd say hire a writer, or at least a local newspaper columnist to help you out.
THIS ONE IS HUGE!!!!
Your email is neither a clickable mailto: or in a form. Just speaking from a lazy internet surfer, if I had to open a new window, go to my email account, come back to your site, copy your email, go back to the other window, paste your email....see what I'm getting at here?
A good suggestion for you since you use Wordpress would be to add the
"Contact Form 7" plugin to your site. It will give a nice, easy to use contact space and will keep people on your site instead of having to fiddle around with leaving it to get in touch with you. If that is too difficult to figure out, at the very least, make your email address clickable. It wouldn't hurt as well to give a business phone number in that section as well.
Personally, I would kill that links link at the top of your page. It's completely out of context and doesn't add anything to your site. In fact, it's a reason for people to leave your site, which is something you don't want them to do.
This is subjective and you may not agree, but the way you have your pricing WORDED, is not good at all. This is the line straight from your site. "Investments Start at 2400 for 8 hours" Right off the bat you are basically telling people you are charging them $300 an hour to shoot their wedding. Not only is it easy math to do right on the spot 8/24, but just how it's so blunt and in your face isn't very appealing. It's just price listing, but you'd be surprised at how well some flowery words and a masking of the price will do to get people to click further. Same goes for the rest of your pricing section. It's funny, but the only somewhat clearly stated part of your pricing section is that you offer discounts for off season days.
Galleries...
You need to get the galleries off the normal blog layout and into a gallery plugin on their own. I scrolled down through your wedding gallery just for kicks. It took me 91 aggressive spins of my mouse wheel to get through it. I'd give a bride looking through about 6 before they were off your page, especially given that you don't have your galleries listed in order where your best pictures are at the top. I think they are just the post archives from the main blog. You can upload a flash gallery onto your site and then you can edit that section of the Tofurious theme to have each of those gallery links "engagements, family, weddings" go to a different web address. If you need some help figuring out how to do that, send me a PM.
Ditch the Archives link at the top as well. Until you get a blog worth reading, you really don't need an Archive section at the top.
And to segway and finish this post, you need to write for your blog. The whole purpose of getting a blog is so that you can update it with more than just pictures. You can add key words to your posts and you can customize each of your post titles so that you get better page ranking through the search engines. It also doubles as a way to express yourself to the people coming to your site. Here's my take. If you want your photography to be just about the pictures, dump the blog site and get a flash site. If you want to be able to express yourself through not only the photos that you take, but also in writing about the weddings you are involved in, keep the blog style. How you have things set up now, you are overloading your blog with pictures and not taking advantage of the whole reason to have a blog site in the first place.
Okay, I'm finished. 
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good luck.