Staying up late, hunched over, bleary eyed and waist deep in CSS, jQuery and the wondrous world of WordPress has caused me to be seriously sleep deprived. You better believe that is going to motivate me to get this little website mini-makeover done with!

Note: To be honest, that fence image has nothing to do with anything.

About 6 months ago, we made the decision to settle down with a blog-driven website because we wanted to have the opportunity for our clients to get to know and interact with us on an on-going sometimes daily basis. Though it may seem unprofessional to share so much of our personal lives, we feel that it’s actually one of the best things we could ever do for our business. The truth is, our business will never grow if we neglect the biggest part of what actually makes our business unique: US! There are a number of other photographers in this area that take beautiful photos and I can tell you for a fact that these people are very talented at what they do. In fact, a simple Google search will turn up results that could overwhelm any prospective client with all the potential photographers to choose from. The only way we will stand out is to forget about trying to compete with others and focus instead on being genuine, relatable people who are willing to share their lives with others.We don’t want to be some mysterious enigma of a business with a slick website but make people wonder if we can be trusted with the most precious moments of their lives. We don’t have anything to hide. We have flaws and mixed motives and deal with a lot of the same things any number of our clients do. Why not lay it all out there for you to see? After all, this “business” is really about so much more than a job or an income or success. We want our focus to be on investing in people and serving people and caring about people and LOVING people. We want our clients to know that they actually matter to us and that we are excited to get to play an important part in their lives by capturing the moments that are special to them. If we can use our blog to make it easier for our clients to really know us and trust us and come to appreciate who we are not just for the photographs that we take, then our website will be doing it’s job.

That being said, we certainly don’t want to miss out on any opportunity to make our visitors’ web experience the best we can make it. While we’re certain that a blog site is the right choice for Grace Leigh Photography, I’m open to the idea of having a dedicated “Portfolio” site in addition to the main blog site. Ever since discovering ShowIt Sites this past summer, I’ve wondered if this was a service that we’d want to have for our business. I’m definitely still interested in the consideration and would welcome thoughts on whether or not it would be worthwhile to have this. Ultimately, our clients need to be able to visit our website and immediately be able to click on the information they want to get at, be it images or content. I think our site now does just that but a few more bells and whistles may not hurt. I’m all for having a finely crafted and sophisticated website with Flash and slideshows and music and the whole works. But my honest opinion is that all of those goodies will not get us any more clients than the next photographer trying to make it in this incredibly saturated industry. In fact, having a personal, open, honest blog won’t get us any more clients either if no one is visiting our site to begin with.

So that brings us to our next and probably biggest project so far. *take a deep breath* SEO, Marketing, and Advertising. Oh my soul. Having finally gotten to a place where we feel like our portfolio is a good representation of our work, and having nailed down a direction we’re almost positive we want to go in with our brand/design/style/etc., NOW is the time to throw all of our energy into marketing our business. No holds barred. Full out. All in. Buck wild. Ape kapowy. We are THERE and YOU are going to be along for the ride with us.

If you have any thoughts, please share them with us in the comments section below. You really aren’t going to offend us with your opinions. We will either be inspired to try something new or even more resolute that we’re making the right decisions. So, win-win.

[[ How about some information about ourselves? You know, the info that should be under the "Grace & Leigh" portion of the site but as of now still says "stay tuned"? Hear ye, hear ye: I will publish said info by this time next week, at the latest. Done. And done. ]]

For now, this website is going to operate more like a blog than a typical photographer’s Flash-based portfolio site. In the future I would like to explore all the options for Flash including the possibility of a Showit website (which you can get for free right now!). Stay tuned….

I can’t write blog posts. Way out of practice.