The history of websites

HTML

A long time ago in a head space far far away, a photographer was trying to get a good looking website to showcase her images. She took an HTML course and hand coded her first website which was a gallery of her stock photos. It looked okay. It was a website after all. At the time not many photographers were able to make their own websites, so she was ahead of the curve. Her clients loved it too. Every time she did a photo shoot she was able to add a special gallery page just for them.

Dreamweaver to the rescue

Then she bought Dreamweaver and had a whole new set of tools to work with. She learned more about tables, frames, cell padding, cell spacing, adding objects, div tags, embedding HTML code snippets, and made an even better website to show her photos. But, it still looked a little amateurish. She really didn’t have any idea about colour pallets or column widths. She didn’t know how to add a blog into that basic website, and she got a lot of spam because her email address wasn’t in a contact form. By then all the “big” photographers were starting to get custom made Flash websites built. But, she couldn’t afford the $3000+ price tag for one of those so she just tried to make do.

Along came Blogger

A couple years after that she started teaching and also using Blogger.com, a free blogging platform. It was like typing into a Word document, as it had all those familiar looking tools in the interface. It was a whole new way of working. It got her lots of Google juice, seeing as Google owned Blogger. She did okay with that and used it mostly to give out notices and quick photo tutorials to her students. But, she couldn’t really get a photo gallery page and a blog post in the same place. She also thought it was kind of clunky to have a separate website and blog, and felt that they should all be under the same roof.

WordPress was cooler

After Blogger she discovered WordPress.com, which was another free blogging software platform which was also easy to use as typing into a Word file. She even got a custom domain name for her new WP blog. WordPress allowed her to have pages and blog posts in the same place. So she could have pages that were permanent, and write about current things in the blog posts and people would be able to see both without having to go to another website. Then she discovered that she wasn’t allowed to use either of these free blogging platforms to sell stuff. She also learned that they could shut her down at any time if they felt she was in violation of their terms of service. That was a risk she couldn’t take, especially as she was shifting her focus to photography training services.

Meeting Pamela Wilson

Pamela and this photographer met in an online course called Teaching Sells. Noticing how talented Pamela was, the photographer read everything Pamela wrote on her Big Brand System blog, and followed her design tutorials to the letter. She still had that old html Dreamweaver website kicking around, and she used Pamela’s tutorials to make it look better.

But something was missing

Pamela was using a different type of WordPress platform. It was still free, but it was called self hosted WordPress and it was available at wordpress.org. The photographer contacted her web hosting company and they installed WordPress for nothing, and with that her new website was born.

But it was still a plain old generic design. It needed something to spice it up! It needed Pamela’s touch.

Too shy to ask

After many weeks of being too shy to ask, the photographer finally contacted Pamela and asked if she would create a custom header for her new WordPress enabled website. Pamela immediately said yes! PHEW. The photographer was elated. But before she even started to create the header, Pamela interviewed the photographer to ask her some very important questions like:

• What was she in business to do?
• Was she a photographer or a teacher?
• Did she sell products or services?
• Who was her target market?
• What was the goal of her website?
• What kinds of colours did she like?
• And many important questions like that.

Embarrassingly, it was the first time the photographer had ever really answered those questions definitively. Sure she’d thought about those answers before, but had never told anyone the answers out loud.

That meeting with Pamela was one of the most important steps the photographer had ever taken in her business.

Tagline for clarity

Pamela also came up with some tagline ideas for the photographer. A tagline is a short phrase or sentence that summarizes what your business does. That was really important because the photographer’s business name didn’t really describe that.

Final chapter

Over the next two years the photographer fine tuned the answers to all those questions and now runs a successful business teaching people how to take better pictures. She still occasionally shoots for corporate clients, and now enjoys digital video production too.

The history of websites is like the history of this photographer’s business

• HTML – a business in it’s infancy cobbling together bits and pieces of the code
• Dreamweaver – a business that wants to grow and get more professional in some sort of framework
• Blogger and WordPress.com – a business that wants to communicate with customers better by giving regular updates
• WordPress.org self hosted – a business that uses modern marketing and communication tools that showcase audio, photos and videos, and can be used to teach and sell services, and integrate with social media channels

So, who is this mystery photographer?

Well you probably guessed that it’s yours truly! Yup I’m the one who spent 10 years struggling to get a professional looking website out there.

And why did I write this long winded story?

You can skip all those years and steps I had to take, and go right into designing and setting up your website using Pamela Wilson and Wendy Cholbi’s Site Setup Kit. The kit has all the parts you need, and the instructions on how to do it yourself right from the start the way you want, with you in total control. No hiring of a web designer or programmer necessary.

As a matter of fact, I asked Pamela to sit down with me and tell me all about Site Setup Kit in an exclusive interview! Watch below:

If you’ve still got one of those old fashioned websites, or are using a free platform, now is the time to take your website to the next level.

Site Setup Kit will get you there faster than it took to write my story

Have a look at the free webinar here that Pamela and Wendy have put together. You can choose a time to watch that suits you best. You’re going to learn a lot about modern websites and how you can catapult your photography from looking so-so to looking highly professional.

If you have any questions about the Site Setup Kit, just ask in the comments

I have purchased the kit myself so I can tell you a little more about it too. But really, you should just watch the interview I did with Pamela or sign up for their webinar because Pamela and Wendy are much better at explaining what they do than I am!