Questions
Everything photographers ask before saying yes.
Including the ones most studios would rather you did not ask. If something is missing, email [email protected] and we will answer it properly, then add it to this page.
The direct ones
Why should I trust a studio I have not worked with?
You should not have to, and that is exactly why the website comes first.
Trust is normally something you are asked to extend up front, as a deposit or a signature, on the strength of work done for somebody else. We would rather earn it on your own project. Send one message, and judge us on the website we design for you. If it is not good, you have spent ten minutes and we have spent a day. The risk sits on our side by design.
What makes it $149?
Focus, mostly.
We design one kind of website for one kind of client, and we have built the process around doing that quickly and well. There is no six-week discovery phase to pay for, because the discovery has already happened across every photography website we have studied.
The founding price of $75 is lower still, for the first ten photographers, in return for permission to show the finished work. That is a straight trade and we would rather name it than dress it up as a limited-time offer.
Will this get me more bookings?
We will not promise you bookings. Too much of it belongs to you and not to us: your market, your pricing, your availability, the season, your photography.
Here is what we will promise. Your website stops being the reason someone books another photographer. That is the part we control, and it is the part we hand you before you pay for it.
Money
Do you take a deposit?
No, never. You pay once the preview is built and you have decided you want it. There is no payment detail asked for at any point before that.
What is not included in the price?
Your domain name, at roughly $12 a year and registered in your name. Photography: we build with yours. Logo design. And hosting beyond the first year, unless you are on the Care Plan. All of it is listed on the packages page, so nothing turns up later.
Is the Care Plan required?
No. It is $29 a month. Optional, and you can cancel at any time. The site is a normal website on your own domain, and you can host it anywhere or hand it to another developer entirely.
Ownership and control
Who owns the site and the photographs?
You do, completely. The domain is registered in your name, the photographs remain yours, and the site is a standard website with no proprietary builder underneath it. You can move it anywhere, at any time, without asking us.
Can I edit it myself afterwards?
Yes, if you are comfortable with files. If you are not, that is what the Care Plan is for. You email us the change and it is done. We would rather you asked than broke something and felt bad about it.
What if I want to leave?
You take everything with you. Cancel the Care Plan, and we hand over every file and the domain access. There is no exit fee and nothing is held hostage.
Time and process
How fast is it really?
A preview within 48 hours of receiving your photographs. Live within 24 to 72 hours of you approving it. The how it works page has the whole timeline, stage by stage.
How much of my time does this take?
About ten minutes, once. You send photographs, your services and a few sentences about yourself. There is no discovery call, no second questionnaire and no revision meetings.
I do not have a domain.
Bring one or we will help you register one. Either way it goes in your name and you own it.
I could build one myself.
You could, and some photographers do it well. Many more start, get three-quarters of the way through, and the site sits unfinished while the season fills up.
A photography website builder hands you a blank canvas, a subscription and a weekend of decisions about column widths. We hand you a finished website designed around your actual photographs. If you enjoy the building, do it. If you have been meaning to for a year, this costs you one message and none of your weekends.
Fit
I do not shoot weddings, portraits or property. Can you still help?
Probably, but ask us first. We build for photographers who sell their own bookings, and the three specialisms are simply where we have done the most thinking. If your work does not suit what we do, we will tell you in the first reply. Taking a job we cannot do well helps nobody.
I already have a website. Is it worth replacing?
Send us the link. If it is doing its job we will say so, and you will have lost nothing but a message. That happens more often than you would expect, and telling someone their site is fine costs us less than building something they did not need.
Are the demonstration sites real client work?
No, and we say so on every one of them. Wedding Canvas Studio, Rowan Hill Portraits and Northline Property Media are studios we invented so we could show you real, working builds instead of a fake logo wall. The photographs in them were generated for the demonstrations. When we have real client work, this answer changes and the work page changes with it.
Is the before-and-after comparison on the home page real?
Both halves are real, working HTML built by us. Not screenshots, and not a real client's site. We built the "before" deliberately, the way a great many photographer sites are put together, and the "after" the way we would build it. The photographs in the two halves are identical, which is the whole point of showing it.