Follow this story…
You’re a photographer using the Photocrati WordPress theme, right?
A prospective bride and groom found your website at Best Of Wedding Photography and visit your website. The decide to hire you based on your portfolio, conversation and reviews from previous customers.
Great!
The couple is then doing research at The Knot and other wedding websites, looking for the easiest and best way to create a wedding website.
They use the tool that The Knot supplies because it is easy. Wonderful…but you, as the photographer, could made an up-sell and created a wedding website using WordPress.
So the story ends and now you lost out on a big opportunity.
Now, selling a wedding website does take more time and resources on top of your photography work. But, because setting up a WordPress website is fairly simple and straight forward, and many web hosting companies (like BlueHost) will do the setup for you, there is no reason to let the up-sell go to The Knot or any other competitor.
So you might be asking where to get a WordPress theme for weddings.
Fortunately, Nathan at WPMods wrote a fantastic article showcasing some of the best WordPress themes for weddings, Brenda has a fantastic summary at WPKube called 10 Best Wedding WordPress Themes for the Big Day and WPLift published 30 Beautiful WordPress Wedding and Event Themes 2012. You might also consider setting up a site using Photocrati.
Think about it this way.
If you can up-sell a fun website to the couple for $500, when it costs around $40 for the theme, $10 for the domain name and use the same host as your own website, then you just made a good amount of profit.
So what is in it for the client compared to a free The Knot style website? Extreme personalization. Using a free wedding website from those competitors doesn’t give your customer much customization like you can do with a WordPress website. You can also incorporate the NextGEN Gallery for wedding and engagement photos or Facebook for family interaction.
Now, I want you think about it. Can you make that happen? Do you have the ability to make this kind of up-sell?
If so, what is holding you back?
Thanks for reading,
Scott
In theory it sounds like a good idea. However setting up a wordpress website and, more importantly, customizing it for the client is far from easy even if you are technically savvy. People always want tweaks. I say that having had several years of experience with WordPress (which I love by the way) building my own sites.
At the very least it will take more time away from actually taking and processing photographs. The photographer could always outsource the website building but that of course will reduce the profit. I have also used Photocrati themes, and I still had customize them and it took time. I use Genesis now and I keep it simple. But I do have a web developer to look after upgrades and any other design elements I can’t or don’t wish to do myself. Simply put, I don’t have the time. There are also many cheap turnkey options for sharing wedding photography, would a client not consider these to a standalone WordPress site?
It’s all how you preset it to your client and how you utilize your time. You can get a website up for a client within minutes using a theme that is specifically designed for such a thing. Like anything in business, something like this takes thought, planning and time management. It can even be compared to processing of photographs. Is it something you can do yourself or is your business booming to the point where you can outsource the task?
Of course it takes planning and as with anything in business the photographer needs to do a cost-benefit analysis of whether it’s worth it for their business. Farming it out would be a consideration whether business is booming or not unless the photographer wants to spend extra time setting up websites and/or is technically savvy. In some cases it may very well be worth it. But even with a theme specifically designed for photographs it takes more than a few minutes to set up (particularly if you are not familiar with WordPress) – and that’s without customization. Exactly how time consuming it can become often doesn’t become apparent until well after the commitment. But then, if they charge a premium for all the time they are going to spend setting up sites then again, perhaps it might be worth it.