livebooks news

My wedding and portrait photography business is based on word-of-mouth advertising and Internet searches. Printed advertisements are not in my marketing plan and never have been. Too many wedding magazines have become cluttered with “noise”, bombarding brides with more interruptive ads than content.

In 2005, I hired a designer to renovate my brand identity and a consultant to overhaul my photography portfolio. The result was a spectacularly clean and well-thought-out portfolio. In an effort to save some money, however, I kept using the website I had built myself.

Many months later, my assistant stumbled onto liveBooks’ web design while surfing the Web and sent me to the site immediately. I was taken with its beauty and functionality. Within two weeks of calling the designers, I had an active, customized website that fit my new brand and contained my new portfolio.

Uploading and organizing my portfolio is so simple and so fast I can personally change my website daily from anywhere in the world.

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Photographer John Russo routinely focuses his lens on celebrities such as Eva Longoria, Jennifer Love Hewitt, and Kevin Costner, so he knows how important the right image can be. Russo has had to think about his own image, too. A year ago, he rebuilt his Web site after being impressed by a number of fellow photographers’ online portfolios built with liveBooks 4.0, a software package designed specifically for publishing Web-based image collections. “It’s clean, it’s simple, and it’s all about the work,” he says.

The Flash-based software lets artists easily create attractive sites that emphasize their images–without too many distracting bells and whistles. “I didn’t want music. I didn’t want things spinning,” says Gregory Heisler, a veteran New York photographer who recently bought a liveBooks package. Photographers also like that liveBooks portfolios are easy to create and maintain. Users simply upload their pictures and arrange them into portfolios of 32 images each. From there, a well-designed editing tool lets them drag and drop to create various galleries for display. Users can also quickly build customized password-protected presentations for specific clients. And the software lets artists control whether or not visitors can print or save any image, eliminating worries about that prized pic being misappropriated.

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If I have to tell you how important a website is to your business, it’s probably too late. The best you can do at this point is run as fast as you can down the tracks and try to catch that train.

For the rest of us, the problem is more complex.

A website is something like a portfolio. It’s a demonstration of our accomplishments and a claim of ability. It stands in for us when we aren’t present. Better than a portfolio, it can, at least theoretically, be in a thousand places at once—kind of like a book, only you can have as many pictures as you like, and change the pictures any time and as often as you like. If you have FTP capability, you can deliver large, finished files to your clients not quite instantly, but quicker than any messenger.

Eventually I found liveBooks and was impressed by the way its sites are formatted to allow for easy, instant changes, large numbers of pictures, and the flexibility of adding more portfolios to the site. The tech support is great, too—I always get a quick, accurate response.

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