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ForegroundWeb Newsletter
YOUR WEEKLY DOSE OF PHOTO WEBSITE ADVICE & INSPIRATION.
IN TODAY’S EMAIL:
⚡️ 3 Quick tips: contact-form fields, pre-redesign archive, annual pricing audit
🧠 Main Topic: The vendor backlink playbook most photographers skip
📷 Website Spotlight: Louise Wellington (interiors & architecture)
🔍 SEO: Check referring domains before chasing rank 1
🌐 From the Trenches: how couples search now + this week's PhotoBizX
QUICK TIPS
1. 📨 Optional form fields sort the inbox, they don't gate it
Photographers keep arguing about contact forms like there are only two settings: three fields or a wall of required questions.
There's a third setting most miss: optional questions. Same questions a heavy form would ask, just without the asterisks.
Budget range as a dropdown. Approximate date. Session type. None of them required.
The casual browser still sends a one-line "do you do family sessions in November?" and doesn't bounce off the form. The serious buyer fills in all three because she actually wants a useful reply, not a "let's hop on a 30-minute call to scope this." She's asking you to do the work she came to your site for.
You read those three answers and you reply with the package that matches her budget and a real date. No five rounds of basics. No call she didn't ask for.
The form isn't filtering people out. It's sorting your inbox so your replies move bookings forward.
What's your contact form sorting for right now, if anything?
2. 💾 Save a full visual archive before you flip the redesign switch
Most photographers think their WordPress export counts as a backup of the old site. It doesn't.
An export gives you the database. It doesn't give you the rendered page, the layout, the testimonial block as it actually looked, the URL of that one wedding post you wrote in 2021. The Wayback Machine catches some of that, but never all of it. Your hosting backup expires in 30 days and then it's gone.
Here's where it bites. About a year after a redesign, a client of mine wanted to bring back a section we'd cut. We had the export. We had the screenshots her designer remembered to take. We did not have the actual page, and trying to reconstruct it from memory turned a one-hour job into a small archaeology project.
The fix takes an hour and costs almost nothing. Run HTTrack against your live site before launch and let it crawl the whole thing to a folder on your hard drive. Or pay your old host for one extra month and download the full account before cancelling. Either one beats trying to remember what your About page used to say.
Future-you opens that folder once and says thanks.
When was the last time you actually looked at what your site said two years ago?
