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ForegroundWeb Newsletter
YOUR WEEKLY DOSE OF PHOTO WEBSITE ADVICE & INSPIRATION.
IN TODAY'S EMAIL:
⚡️ 3 Quick tips: template vs. content, nav labels, giveaways
🧠 Main Topic: The five-figure email most photographers never send to past clients
📷 Website Spotlight: Jolyons Photography
🔍 SEO: Audit the first page of your own name in Google
🌐 From the Trenches: AI fakes vs. real work, the blogging collapse, and building a business anywhere
QUICK TIPS
1. 💡 Your template is fine. Your content isn't.
Most photography website templates are more powerful than what photographers use them for.
I had a call recently where a photographer wanted to switch templates because the site felt "off." We looked at it together. The template was Cadence, perfectly capable. The real issues? Inconsistent font sizes, cramped spacing, and copy that didn't say much.
Typography and whitespace fixes alone can make a site feel brand new. No migration, no relearning a new tool, no rebuilding 40 pages from scratch.
And it starts with content. Your copy, your portfolio images, the messaging that tells visitors why they should hire you. Get those right, and the design just has to stay out of the way.
I've seen too many photographers spend months switching platforms only to carry the same weak content into a shinier box.
What's one thing you could fix on your current site this week without touching the template?
Open your menu right now. If anything there isn't a plain noun (About, Testimonials, Contact, Services, Portfolio, Pricing, Blog), you've probably got a translation problem.
Here's the mechanism most photographers miss. After two decades of clicking around websites, your visitor's eye is calibrated to a specific shortlist of nav words. Pricing. Contact. About. Services. Testimonials. Their gaze locks onto those shapes before their brain even reads them. Swap in a synonym and the auto-pilot breaks. They have to stop, decode, decide. Most won't bother.
So when the nav says "Love Letters." "Kind Words." "Meet Your Photographer." "Collections." every one of those forces a translation step on a visitor who hasn't decided you're worth the effort yet.
Four traps I see most often on photographer sites:
Love Letters / Kind Words / Happy Clients. Cute, but they cost you the word people scan for. Use Testimonials.
Meet Your Photographer / Hello, I'm Jane. Charming on the page itself, invisible in the nav. Use About.
Message me. Reads like a Facebook Messenger button. Use Contact.
Collections. The big one. Pic-Time, PhotoShelter, and ShootProof have spent years training your past clients that "Collections" means a gallery archive. Click it on a service site and they feel mildly lost before your pricing even loads. If yours leads to services or pricing, use Packages or Services.
Here's the part most photographers miss on top of all that: search engines don't know what "Kind Words" or "Investment" means either. People type "wedding photographer testimonials" and "wedding photographer pricing" into Google. Your cute label loses the SEO signal on top of the UX one.
Your menu is a decision tool, not a voice exercise. Boring nav, interesting page. That always wins.
Fix takes ten minutes. Rename them back to what they are: Love Letters becomes Testimonials, Meet Your Photographer becomes About, Collections becomes Packages or Services, Investment or Cost becomes Pricing, Message me becomes Contact.
What's the worst cute nav label you've seen in the wild?
