When I remember back to the beginning of our blogging days, I remember how much we didn’t know. All we knew was that we wanted to have our own website. That shouldn’t be too hard, right?

Wrong.

First of all, how do we create a website?

We Googled.

We needed a website host.

We Googled more.

There were so many websites hosts to choose from! Squarespace, WordPress, TypePad, and the list went on…

Even as we figured out each task, a new one would pop up. It was crazy!!

Once we decided to end our blog and move forward with photography instead, that swirl of questions started popping back up again. So what did we do?

We Googled again! (Seriously we wouldn’t have made it without Google!)

Luckily, we now have cultivated our favorite programs out there that help run our business. I spoke about three of them is this post. Go back and read that if you haven’t already.

I’m here to talk about a few more…

Show It

Show It is the company we used to create our current website! We love it!! While we invested in a more custom design, if you’re just starting out, there are so many beautiful templates you can use to get you started. Also, the support team is incredible. Although we had already created a website before, we still had so many questions, and they have helped us tremendously along the way! Show It was created by photographers for photographers so they know exactly what we need and how we want our clients to view and navigate through our website. It’s genius, guys!

Pass Gallery

As embarrassing as it is now, the very first images we delivered as a business a few years ago were on a disc. Don’t be offended if you’ve done this as well! With technology as it is these days, we believe there are so many better photo delivery options than handing someone a disc or a flashdrive. We use Pass as our delivery system. Each client gets a link delivered to them once we’ve edited and uploaded all of their images. They can simply click on each image they want to download and have it on their computer or phone in seconds. They can then share the link with any of their friends or family, which gets our images in front of others eyes without us even trying! The galleries are simple, easy to use, and most importantly professional. Check and check!

Blog Stomp

After we’ve photographed an engagement session or wedding, one of our favorite things to do is to blog it! Blogging allows our clients to see the best of the best of their galleries and allows us to show everyone what a large gallery of our photos looks like all together. One thing that you may not think about when you’re first starting out is how large the file size is for one photo. Uploading a bunch of photos to your website can slow it wayyy down. In our world of instant gratification, we will click off of a website really quickly if it won’t load. Enter, blog stomp. It’s a software that helps us create blog posts full of images without slowing our website down so our viewers can seamlessly flow through our blog! It’s one of those things you don’t appreciate until you have it!

 

Well there you have it! Three more tools that we use everyday in our business. We are so thankful that we’ve found each of these companies!!

Click here to check out The Software That Runs Our Business Part One.

 

-Chelsea