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ForegroundWeb Newsletter
YOUR WEEKLY DOSE OF PHOTO WEBSITE ADVICE & INSPIRATION.
IN TODAY’S EMAIL:
⚡️ 3 Quick tips: watching strangers use your site, picking one redesign number, and the real cost of free
🧠 Main Topic: The cost of doing nothing on your website is also a number
📷 Website Spotlight: Suzanne Rothmeyer's hero locks in positioning before scroll
🔍 SEO: The AI visibility audit most photographers skip
🌐 From the Trenches: where photographers hide their best work
QUICK TIPS
1. 🪑 Watch a stranger fill out your contact form
You can't see the friction on your own site anymore.
Here's how you know: you hit submit on your own form, the email lands in your inbox, you call it good. That's the test most photographers run. It proves nothing. You wrote the form, so of course you can fill it out.
Every word, field, and label has been baked into your brain over months of editing. A first-time visitor reads "tell us about your wedding" with a 500-character minimum and winces. You read it and feel nothing. You've gone blind to your own copy.
The fix takes five minutes. Before any redesign, sit a non-photographer at your computer and ask them to inquire about your services. Your partner, your sibling, the friend who actually hires photographers. Anyone who hasn't seen the staging URL.
Then the hard part: don't help. Don't explain. Don't apologize when they get stuck. Just watch their face when they reach the character minimum, watch which field they re-read three times, watch them tab into the wrong box.
That wince is your conversion problem. Five minutes of silent observation beats a month of analytics.
2. 🎯 Pick one number before you redesign
What's the most recent thing you said about your website?
If the words were "cleaner," "more modern," or "more me," you've already lost the redesign before a single wireframe gets drawn.
Aesthetic words have no tiebreaker. When the designer asks "show prices or hide them?" or "how loud should the CTA be?", "cleaner" can't decide. Every call becomes a taste argument, and the site ships looking nice but performing the same.
Pick one number that has to change. Write it as "from X to Y."
"From 4 wedding inquiries a month to 10, average budget over $5k." "From 60% of leads asking 'what do you charge' to 60% asking 'are you free in August'."
That number becomes the tiebreaker for every design decision. Without it, you're paying for new paint on the same engine.
What number would you put on yours?
