Critique my wedding photography website.

[CarstenSchertzer]

Hello everyone! I've been shooting professionally for a while now. I was booking a few job here and there but now it seems I can't book a single thing. I've recently gotten a new website, and I've been advertising with google Adwords and Facebook ads and I get a fair amount of traffic to my site but never any enquiries. I'm thinking maybe something in my website is throwing them off and making them uninterested I'm hiring me.


this is my website: Home - Ventura County Wedding Photography


could you guys take a look and see if there's anything that you would think would discourage potential brides?

Thanks so much,

Carsten

 

[runnah]

Your site is massive! You have image files that are over 2mb. That is way too high for a website. This makes the page load very slowly almost 6 seconds for me. Often people will leave if a site takes too long to load.

 

[chris]

$16000 for 8 hours when you could go for $2000 for 10 hours instead.

 

[ronlane]

$16000 for 8 hours when you could go for $2000 for 10 hours instead.

That's a deep discount for those extra 2 hours.

 

[CarstenSchertzer]

Your site is massive! You have image files that are over 2mb. That is way too high for a website. This makes the page load very slowly almost 6 seconds for me. Often people will leave if a site takes too long to load.

That is a really good point! I never noticed because my site loads instantly for me but it may not load that quick for everyone else.

Thanks!

 

[CarstenSchertzer]

Oops! Major typo!(salute)

gotta fix that

 

[Robin_Usagani]

It needs something more.

Too many kissing shot IMO on the splash page.

 

[Febs]

Oops! Major typo!(salute)

gotta fix that

I think that you need to take a hard critical look at all of the copy on your site, not only with respect to typographical errors (and there are many of them) but also with respect to the message that you are sending to your prospective clients. For example, in your "About Carsten" link, you write, "I Struggle with every image I shoot." The "S" in "struggle" should not be capitalized, but more importantly, I think that this statements sends a very negative message to your prospective clients. I understand that you go on to explain that you "struggle" because you want to "wring perfection" out of every image, but that message is not reassuring to prospective clients. Your clients are hiring you for their once-in-a-lifetime event. They don't want someone who is going to "struggle" to get perfect images. They want to hire someone who has the talent, training, and experience necessary to assure them that their memories will be captured.

Similarly, you write, "I don't just photograph subjects. I photograph the way they make me feel." Your wedding clients don't want you to capture how YOU feel. They want you to capture how THEY feel.

(Full disclosure: I am not a wedding photographer, but I am a musician who runs a professional band, so I have dealt with many, many wedding clients over the years, and I think that the general principles are the same.)