📸 You should schedule a monthly business review

Plus 3 quick tips: a rant about Showit sites, creative blocks and design languages

Author

Alex Vita
November 21, 2023 • Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

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Happy Tuesday! Let’s dive right in:

IN TODAY’S EMAIL:

  • ⚡️ 3 Quick tips: a rant about Showit sites, creative blocks and design languages

  • 🧠 Deep dive: You should schedule a monthly business review

  • 🔍 SEO: CTR and CR explanation

  • 🎓 The reason blogging is so difficult for most photographers

  • 🖥️ Website examples: A cook VideoAsk widget example

  • 🔗 Links & Resources: chaos in the AI space + more cool links

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

QUICK TIPS

1. Why I DON'T recommend using Showit for photography websites

If you're thinking of using Showit as a platform for building your photography portfolio, consider this as a vote AGAINST it.

This video explains why:

Showit has an inherent flaw: it only provides design editing for desktop and mobile devices. But on tablets, it's a mess. It just scales the desktop design down till it fits.

If you load a Showit template on an iPad, the text is so small that it's barely readable.

Even if you're impressed by some of their templates (they do look pretty out of the box), they don't add up to a good user experience on the website.

Instead, you should go with WordPress (and a good theme), or SquareSpace, which doesn't suffer from the same mobile-friendliness issues.

Read this for more information about the different levels of mobile-friendliness:

The 4 levels of website mobile-friendliness | ForegroundWeb

Even if you pass Google's test, there are different levels of mobile friendliness, which all come down to offering a good user-experience (UX).

www.foregroundweb.com/levels-of-mobile-friendliness

2. Creative blocks are not about finding inspiration

Inspiration is easy to find online these days. No one struggles with a lack of sources of inspiration.

Getting "stuck," on the other hand, is usually a mental or emotional block that requires:

  • the courage to experiment with more courageous photo projects

  • the confidence to go off the safe path

  • the discipline and patience to keep trying new things even when you don't feel like it.

I'm fond of this quote by William Faulkner: "I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o'clock every morning."

So creative blocks are not about finding inspiration but about the practice of doing good work regularly.

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