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ForegroundWeb Newsletter
YOUR WEEKLY DOSE OF PHOTO WEBSITE ADVICE & INSPIRATION.
IN TODAY’S EMAIL:
⚡️ 3 Quick tips: working with a designer, clickable client PDFs, one LUT per camera body
🧠 Main Topic: Generic ads name the service. Story ads name the worry.
📷 Website Spotlight: Urban Safari brand photography
🔍 SEO: You're not penalised. You're plateaued.
🌐 From the Trenches: two Google Business Profile alerts + the $10M portrait studio playbook
QUICK TIPS
1. 🤝 A good designer hands you a shorter to-do list, not a longer one
If prepping for your new website feels like homework, someone set it up wrong.
Before a build, photographers ask me the same nervous questions. Which file service should I use? How do I name everything? Do I have to resize all the images myself first?
Here's what I tell them. Use whatever you already use. Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, all fine. Name the files however is easy for you. And the resizing? Don't bother. Send me the high-res originals and I'll handle the conversion.
None of that is me being generous. It's the job.
Your energy should go into the one decision nobody can make for you: which images actually represent the work you want to be hired for. That's hours of real thinking. Renaming folders and chasing export presets is not.
So when a handoff buries you in technical steps, notice who it was built for. Usually the designer, not you.
Before your next project, ask one question: what do you actually need from me, and what can you handle on your end?
2. 📎 Your PDF CTA is flat text and the click dies there
Open the last PDF you sent a client. Pricing guide, welcome packet, post-shoot delivery PDF, lead magnet. Try clicking the URL on page 2. Try clicking your email address. Try clicking the "book your session" button on the last page.
If most of those are flat text, your PDF is a dead end.
The reader has to retype the URL, copy-paste the email, or remember to come back later. Most won't. You designed the page like a CTA but shipped it like a printout.
Anywhere you'd want a click on a webpage, you should want a click in the PDF. Booking page, Instagram handle, email, the thing the QR code is already pointing at. The PDF is asking for the action. You just forgot to let it be tappable.
The fix is ninety seconds per PDF in any design tool. Highlight the text, paste the URL, save. Done.
I keep running into this same friction on photographer websites too. Email shown as plain text in the header. Logo not linked back to home. The PDF is just the offline cousin of the same mistake.
So go open it.
