livebooks news

This past May, liveBooks and Rangefinder Publishing, monthly magazine for the professional photographer, teamed up for the first-ever emerge Photography Competition to spotlight some of the up-and-coming talent in today’s professional wedding market. Professional photographer J Sandifer, Wedding Marketing and Development Manager for liveBooks and one of the contest’s principal organizers, says “This competition provides emerging photographers with a high-profile platform where they can showcase their prized photos to key industry players and ultimately jump start their wedding photography business. The competition was judged not on a single image but on how contestants were able to tell a story with multiple images, making it unique in the competition space.”

Contestants submitted no more than 10 photos to five wedding categories: Preparation, Details, Wedding Venue, The Kiss, and Favorite Wedding. The top three photographers in each category were awarded a prize package (valued at $2200) of a one-year subscription to a liveBooks predesigned Web site, a one-year subscription to a Pictage account, a one-year subscription to a ShootQ account, a 2011 WPPI VIP pass, a Think Tank Photo Belt, a $100 Asuka Book gift card, an X-Rite ColorChecker Passport, an Induro tripod kit, and PhotoTools 2.5 Professional Edition from onOne Software. In addition to those prizes, the top photographer in each category also received an advertising package from TheKnot.com, a professional photography kit from Sony, LabPrints Album Design Bundles and onOne Software Plug-In Suite 5 (valued at nearly $5500).

Read more by clicking here.

Frederick Van Johnson, of This Week in Photo sat down with former liveBooks Chief Marketing Officer, John Philpin, to discuss the future  of Flash and how they are dealing with Flash versus html 5 on their websites for photographers.

Photographers are now, moreso than ever, faced with the dilemma of how to have the largest number of people view their work; i.e. if you are on an iPad and the website is flash-laden, you won’t see  anything at all. Philpin, however, believes the most important thing is a consistent and premiere presentation, which Flash offers. liveBooks’ sites are all Flash-based with html shadow sites. Now there is automatic software that detects if an iPhone or iPad arrives at a liveBooks website which redirects to an iPhone or iPad specific experience. The images are scaled up or down depending on the size of the device.

Click here to listen to the interview.

Rangefinder Magazine published an article about blogging as a marketing tool in the business world that has personalized companies large and small and given a face to corporate entities worldwide. Shauna Harris of Rangefinder sat down with J Sandifer, the former Wedding Marketing & Development Manager at liveBooks, and asked, “What makes a blog work so well – and why, specifically in the photography industry? What can you do to ensure your blog is well regarded and highly trafficked?” J, a professional photographer based in Portland, remarked that “Most professional photographers are individual entities. There is no community or workplace collaboration when we’re by ourselves. Blogs create a sense of community for us and allow us photographers at home to reach out and connect with a larger community.” The most common reason given for starting a blog is to share or connect with others. Providing various means of interaction among followers is the key to a blog’s success. Allowing feedback on posts via a comment box, supplying visitors with an RSS Feed to subscribe to your blog, posting links to otall play into and build off of the backbone of a blog.

To read the whole article, click here.

Tim Grey of Outdoor Photographer wrote on the usefulness of website hosting platforms for creative professionals that allow you to get your images out there without the hassle. He argues, instead of paying to have a website custom-made from scratch, try one of a few powerful, easy-to-use options designed for photographers like you.

Of course, one of the top options is liveBooks. Grey writes, “Some of the world’s top photographers are putting liveBooks to use, and with good reason. First and foremost, liveBooks provides you with the ability to create a stunning display for your photographic images with an elegant user experience. When you visit a site created by liveBooks, you’ll probably have a difficult time believing it was created with online tools. At only $39 per month, liveBooks offers a very affordable way to create an attractive photography website. liveBooks also has partnered with Pictage to enable the sale of prints directly through your site. You can try liveBooks free for 14 days to see what’s possible.”

Read the full article here.

CrunchGear, a blog covering gadgets, gear, games, and tech culture, reviewed liveBooks. Here is some of what Dave Freeman had to say about us.

There’s no shortage of websites out there designed for photographers. The problem is, most of them aren’t that good, or are intended for the Mom & Pop crowd. For example: Flickr. Nice site, but it’s not exactly for pros, and you have to pay for what pro functionality it has. Picasa albums aren’t as popular as Flickr, and certainly don’t have the same sense of community. Smugmug, on the other hand, is considered to be one of the best. The problem with SmugMug is that it requires a little too much tweaking. Sure, you can set it up to look really nice, but that requires a knowledge of coding and can be quite complicated. liveBooks however has a really elegant interface that’s easy to use, easy to customize, and easy to manage.

One of the things that really sets liveBooks apart is their search engine optimization. The site that the end user sees is Flash based, and extremely elegant. While this is great for the end user experience, it cripples your search engine optimization. liveBooks has come up with an effective solution to this, by cloning your site into standard HTML to allow web crawlers to keyword your site.

I was also very impressed by the level of support provided on the liveBooks website. They have an extensive area dedicated to everything from customizing your site to the best way to optimize your Google juice. I moved my personal site over to their hosting, just to see how long it took. liveBooks contacted my domain registry company for me and updated the DNS information. The entire process took about 8 hours (excluding the normal propagation time).

Read the full article here.

Digital Photography School, a site dedicated to showing you how to use your digital camera with tips from a community of photographers of all experience levels, reviewed liveBooks. Here is a clip of what they had to say:

You’ve put together a pretty impressive photography portfolio, and you’re finally at the stage where you want to show your work to the world. Maybe you just want to share your work for critique, or even more likely, you’d like to lure potential clients in with examples of your photography, or maybe you just want to try pursuing a career actually directly selling your work. Whatever the reason, most of us have come to realize that an online portfolio is perhaps the most elegant way to pursue all of the objectives above. Your own personal site can be customized to your own aesthetics, not limited to just any ol’ photosharing site’s layout. A personal site is more distinguished, it says something to clients – it hints at a certain degree of professionalism and seriousness. And frankly a personal portfolio site is just a lot cooler, nothing beats the cache and simplicity of providing folks with your own “www.johnsmithphotography.com” URL name.

If you’re looking to finally have your own professionally designed online portfolio, that’s easy to create and maintain, I certainly “Highly Recommend” liveBooks.com. Could it be done cheaper? Yes, but liveBooks attention to detail behind the scenes, their customization, and pre-built designs that really emphasize YOUR work (and not the liveBooks service) make it easily worth the relatively low cost.

Rob Galbraith of the blog Rob Galbraith Digital Photography Insights covered liveBooks’ iPhone and iPad compatibility release. Come May, a liveBooks service will automatically detect if one of Apple’s mobile devices is browsing a photographer’s liveBooks website and redirect the viewer away from a Flash-based gallery to an HTML version that includes the ability to navigate using a swipe gesture. The size of photos that appear will be dictated by whether it’s the smaller iPhone or larger iPad doing the surfing.

Read the full article here.

Photo District News (PDN), an award-winning monthly magazine for the professional photographer, wrote an article on liveBooks’ updated service for iPhone and iPad compatibility. The update, called liveBooks Version 5.9, will let web browsers on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch view liveBooks’ Flash-based sites. Since those mobile devices from Apple do not support Flash, photographers who’ve used liveBooks’ portfolio sites either couldn’t show off their work on iPhones, iPads etc., or have had to specifically customize their websites to do so.

Read the full article here.

Picture-soup.com, a photography blog writing on photography tips, techniques, marketing and business best practices, gear reviews and photography inspiration, reviewed liveBooks and discussed its affordability. Here are some of the things they mentioned about us:

Since its inception, website design/hosting company liveBooks has created sites for more than 7,000 photographers and creative professionals. liveBooks recently added a new option for photographers and creative artists who want a professional website to market their work but can’t afford a custom designed website—a subscription based service offering pre-designed templates.

The company explains that it is able to offer these affordable, flexible payments for the pre-designed options after having secured $5 million in funding from both strategic and private investors. The subscription based service means no up front commitment of a large sum of money, which is the norm with many website design companies and is the case with liveBooks’ custom designed sites. The pre-designed website payment choices include $39 per month, $399 per year or a one time payment of $1,199 plus $90 per year hosting. Custom designed sites typically begin at $3,200.

Photo by Jake Rosenberg

“liveBooks makes everything so simple, even someone with very limited technical knowledge would have no trouble using their services,” Jake says. “livBooks offers a huge variety of pre-made sites that cater to so many different styles of photography. It really wasn’t difficult to find one that suited my needs,” he adds.

Read more here.

Rangefinder magazine recently highlighted seven rising stars, three of which are liveBooks customers. Read below to learn how Natalie Dybisz, Adriana Mullen and Zackary Canepari broke through the noise to get noticed.

Chance meetings, photo sharing, plum assignments and serendipity have played a role in jumpstarting the careers of some of today’s most promising photographers. Each of the young pros showcased here hails from a different photographic and geographic background and is driven by an individual, inspirational muse. As a group, they share but one common denominator: pursuing a dream.

Read the full article here.

photo.net recently gave rave reviews of liveBooks and a little ‘how to’ on getting started with us.

So you’re a photographer. You’re a professional, advancing amateur, amateur, photo enthusiast, and or all of the above. You have a print portfolio you carry around with you to consultations for potential photo gigs. Or perhaps you have an online gallery on photo.net, Flickr, SmugMug. But do you have a photography website? It’s one of the best visual and marketing tools a photographer can have.

Looking around for other website design resources, I came across liveBooks, which offers predesigned templates for flash websites for photographers. I thought I’d give it a try and see how easy it is to put together a site using their design tools.

Read the full article here.

Rangefinder Radio host Scott Sheppard recently sat down with liveBooks’ Wedding Development Manager J Sandifer to talk about building websites, how to implement an effective SEO strategy and the new emerge competition.

Listen to the podcast on iTunes …

Professional Photographer, the official magazine of Professional Photographers of America, mentioned liveBooks’ exceptional SEO wisdom and consulting. Here is a some of what they had to say:

SEO is Search Engine Optimization. After either working long and hard designing, coding, debugging, and selecting images for your website, or spending a lot of money for someone else to do the design and coding work, you want your website to be easily found and that means making sure it ranks high, preferably on the first page, on a search engine’s list for photographers with your specialty in your town and in your region. An effective SEO strategy can be a powerful and cost effective marketing tool as the investments you have to make are merely ones of intellectual capital and time. SEO is only one component of your marketing strategy, of course, and all marketing is about building awareness.

liveBooks note: liveBooks’ customer Natalie Dybisz, aka Miss Aniela, recently conducted a series of interviews with the folks at Photography Blog, based in the UK. Click on the links below to view her images and to hear her thoughts on developing her brand, building her website and capturing a unique array of images.

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This Week In Photography’s Frederick Van Johnson talks with John Philpin. As Frederick says at the beginning of the interview … “John is here from liveBooks to talk about their service and what they can do for photographers.”

To listen to this interview, click here.