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ForegroundWeb Newsletter
YOUR WEEKLY DOSE OF PHOTO WEBSITE ADVICE & INSPIRATION.
IN TODAY'S EMAIL:
⚡️ 3 Quick tips: link previews, mobile buttons, header code
🧠 Main Topic: Is your good-enough photography website actually enough?
📷 Website Spotlight: Matt Baugh (a real estate rebuild, with the case study)
🔍 SEO: Your homepage doesn't have a URL of its own
🌐 From the Trenches: Zenfolio's AI assistant, Pixieset gallery opt-ins, selling a photography studio
QUICK TIPS
1. 🏷️ Your link preview should say what you photograph
A pretty link preview still doesn't tell strangers what you shoot.
When someone pastes your URL into LinkedIn, Facebook or WhatsApp, the app looks for one tag in your page code, the Open Graph image (og:image). If the tag is missing, the app grabs something from the page on its own or shows plain text.
To check yours, paste your homepage into a chat and cover the URL with your thumb. Could someone who has never heard of you tell what kind of photographer you are?
Most people who see a shared link haven't been on your site yet, so the preview does the introducing. A photo on its own only shows that you take nice pictures. That's why I'd turn the default share image into a small branded card, so whenever your work gets shared around, the preview says what you specialize in.
Open your strongest cover image in Photoshop at 1200 x 630 pixels, then add your logo and one line about what you shoot, in white and near the center (some apps crop the preview to a square). Upload it as the default share image. On hosted platforms that field usually sits in the SEO settings, sometimes under a Social tab.
Did you ever set your share image on purpose?
On Squarespace, a button that sits under its text on desktop can end up somewhere else on a phone.
To check yours, open your homepage on your phone and look at where each button lands. It should sit right under the text it belongs to, because that text is the reason anyone would tap it. When it drifts, it shows up above the paragraph it's meant to follow, or two photos further down.
This happens because Squarespace keeps the mobile layout separate from desktop. On desktop you arrange blocks side by side on a grid, and on a phone they get stacked into one column. So you can rearrange a section on desktop, and the phone version still has the button stranded somewhere you never meant it to be.
To fix it, open the page in the editor and switch to mobile view (the phone icon in the top toolbar). Then drag the blocks in each section into this order: images, text, button, then the next image. The images up top break up the scroll, and the button comes right after someone has read why they'd want to tap it. Save, then check it again on your actual phone.
When did you last scroll through your whole site on your phone?
