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ForegroundWeb Newsletter
YOUR WEEKLY DOSE OF PHOTO WEBSITE ADVICE & INSPIRATION.
IN TODAY'S EMAIL:
⚡️ 3 Quick tips: the audience line that names nobody, the audit ignore list, where your form submissions actually live
🧠 Main Topic: The handover question almost nobody asks their web designer
📷 Website Spotlight: Amber Roberts Images, a redesign that finally feels like her
🔍 SEO: Shortening your old blog posts is what costs you traffic
🌐 From the Trenches: the pages AI answers actually quote, Google Maps' 72 signals, PhotoBizX on 2K Santa sessions
QUICK TIPS
1. 🎯 An audience line broad enough to include nobody
Most branding pages name an audience so wide it reaches nobody.
A photographer I worked with recently had this sitting under her branding headline: "entrepreneurs, creatives, founders, and professionals who need more than a headshot".
Nothing in it is wrong, exactly, it just never lands on a person. "Creatives" pulls the page back toward the fashion crowd she wasn't chasing, and "more than a headshot" describes the product instead of the buyer who is reading.
So I asked what kind of businesses she wanted that side of her work to bring in. She answered in one go: consultants, speakers, authors and attorneys whose visibility drives their business, people who need images that position them as the authority rather than content for social media.
That's the line. It was in her email to me, not on her page.
I see this constantly on service pages. A category list feels safer because it leaves nobody out, and that's the trap: an executive skims it, doesn't see her own job in there, and keeps browsing.
Swapping in the actual job titles is usually a one-sentence edit, and the page starts reading like it was written for the person on it.
When did you last read your own service page intro as the buyer? Would YOUR ideal client see her job on it?
2. 🧹 The most useful part of an audit is the ignore list
Half the value of a website audit is knowing what NOT to spend your time on.
So every audit I send has a section near the top listing what I checked and decided you can leave alone. It surprises people more than the fixes do.
The reason it's in there is that a long list of problems lands as a verdict on the whole site. A photographer opens it, reads the whole list as proof the site is a mess, and does none of them. But the length of a list like that says more about how thorough the person writing it was than about the state of your site. Most of the items are small, and only the top tier moves the number you actually care about.
You can do this yourself, on any checklist you run. Sort every item into: 1) moves bookings or print sales this quarter, 2) worth doing next time you're in that page anyway, 3) never. Those free SEO scanners hand you a screenful of red warnings, and most of what they flag will never be felt by a visitor.
What's been on your website to-do list the longest? And what would actually change if you finally did it?
