Web Edit: Amy Rose Productions

Last year, Will Good and I teamed up to help Worcester, Massachusetts-based photography duo Amy Rose Productions refine their website and boost their SEO. While Will kicked off his SEO Audit with Missy and Chelsea, I jumped into their web edit.

When I first worked with Missy and Chelsea, they already had a defined photographic style and voice. I was immediately impressed with their portfolio, and it was easy for me to match clients to it. Despite this, it was hard to figure out their target audience. First, I noticed that their site structure focused heavily on marketing their services, studio, and brand as opposed to the portfolio itself, which had only one visible link in their navigation menu (Commercial Photography). It seemed that photography wasn’t the main focus of their business, which could be the make-or-break factor for some clients.

Their edit also lacked direction and cohesiveness. Although I could see that Missy and Chelsea had an established style, their messaging became blurred once I clicked into the Food and Lifestyle galleries as well as the Campaigns page, which was a medley of various projects.

With these observations in mind, we spent the first stage of the web edit brainstorming a new site structure that would help them connect with their dream clients. To achieve this, we needed to tighten up the navigation and recenter the focus of the site to their photography portfolios. This was easily resolved by consolidating the miscellaneous link into another drop-down menu (The Studio) and removing the Welcome! link.

Before I recommended these changes, I connected with Will to make sure that they were SEO-friendly. In short, the site structure determines which pages are the most important, and which will rank higher in the search engines. The easier it is to access their photo galleries, the higher those pages will rank. I’ve also found that most site visitors — especially those not familiar with a photographer’s work — tend to start from the top of the navigation menu and move their way downward. So, we would want to “rank” their galleries accordingly. An organized and easily navigable site structure with a clean design will not only benefit their SEO, but it will also direct their target clients more easily around their site.

Next on our list was to tighten up and reorganize their galleries. The first gallery we nixed was “Food,” but I kept images that seemed to be part of a larger project on the side. Next, I tackled the edits for their home and garden and still life galleries.

One of Missy and Chelsea’s many strengths is their attention to detail regarding things like color, composition, lighting, and styling. This made them great fits for home furnishings and décor brands like URBN, IKEA, and West Elm. On top of these brands, Missy and Chelsea also wanted to connect with publications like Dwell. They had a strong commercial portfolio, photographing home furnishing products within a space (think IKEA showrooms and catalogs).

However, this potentially disconnected them from editorial clients, who typically look for a “story” about a space (think various wide angles and detail shots of one particular space or structure, more architectural than the product). So, I approached the gallery with the intention of pulling in more of that editorial feel. To achieve this, I sought out any small projects they might’ve had and grouped them with images that had similar furnishing styles or themes to create “collections.” I pulled in as many detail and wide shots as I could and used color to flow smoothly from one “collection” to the other. This way, it felt as though we were looking at several different projects, rather than a collection of their best images.

Because photography websites are less text-heavy than most sites, I wanted to optimize the SEO by adding searchable keywords where text was necessary. In this case, this meant the gallery titles. However, titling this gallery “Interiors” felt a bit misleading as it was more product-focused, so I gave it the name Interior Spaces.

I pulled in most of the detail shots from their Product folder, so I worked on editing their Product gallery alongside the Interior Spaces gallery. Since Interior Spaces was basically environmental product photography, it didn’t feel much different from the actual product gallery. I also wanted to stray away from any images that felt like e-commerce because Missy and Chelsea had stronger images where they were more involved with styling. This gave me a narrower selection of images; to diversify the gallery and edit, I highlighted more of their studio still-life photography and pulled in a few GIFs. I also added a few environmental product shots, but not enough to clash with the Interior Spaces gallery. This created a collection of colorful, highly stylized imagery that reflects Missy and Chelsea’s equally colorful personalities.

To add a little bit of spice, I titled this gallery Home Goods & Décor. (It also felt a bit more accurate and SEO-friendly.)

From these galleries, we also pulled unique projects that were worth highlighting. These would live under a Projects section of their website.

Though interiors and product photography were (and still are) their bread and butter, one of Missy and Chelsea’s main goals was to expand their portfolio with fashion and lifestyle work. We pulled a couple of lifestyle projects that were hidden in their previous interiors and campaigns gallery, which I simply edited and sequenced.

Rounding out the commercial work with more editorial-leaning work, we created a page for the story projects of Oaxaca-based artisans. Here, we were able to really tie in all of Missy’s and Chelsea’s main specialties (interiors, products, and lifestyle).

I was a bit more selective for their fashion gallery because it felt much different than the work we were seeing previously. They tended to lean towards a colorful but clean and minimal color palette and a Bohemian style, so I only selected those types of images along with ones where I could see a fitting client.

Last but not least, we wrapped up the web edit with a fashion lifestyle project they had produced.

With their newly refined website, they were ready to hit the ground running with their marketing!

See more of Amy’s work on her website.

Further Reading:

Read more articles about Brand Narrative and Amy Rose on our blog.