livebooks news

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.

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.