Today we’re reviewing Nicole Gatto Photography.
First thing I notice is the Font is the same all over which means that the logo doesn’t stand out as unique.

So right away, I would think about changing up the logo. It might cost you some money to do, but it will help distinguish the branding from the functional aspects of the site.

Design wise, I feel a site like this needs a little grounding. Some designs really work well with lots of white space, but this one, I feel needs some design elements. Maybe different color behind the menu, and maybe even just a stroke around the photograph.

I’ve designed a couple sites that have a similar look, you can see what I did on http://teresakphotography.com and http://amandalambphoto.com

The photo on the Home Page is a nice photo, but it is an unemotional detail. If you use just one photo, make it the most emotional one you have. Try to get your potential brides seeing themselves as one of your brides.

Also, when you hover over the image, you’re able to click it, but just goes to the photo itself. You don’t want to lose people like that. You can make it unclickable by going into WordPress and making it click to no-where.

Under the main photo you have links to the same places you have up in the navigation, and one doesn’t even work. You have less than a minute to have your visitor get what they want to get when they come to your site, so it’s not a good idea to have redundant things on your site.

The text towards the bottom is good, but it’s dense. The Josefin Sans font is nice, but it’s not very good font for large bodies of text.

First, I’d change your font to something more readable.

Second, lighten it up here. You’re introducing people to your site, so they don’t need to read 300 words.

Also, the first  “Buffalo Wedding Photographers” Makes me think you’re addressing them. So if this is the page you want to rank, tone it down and use it naturally. Google prefers sites that are aimed at people, not search engines.

Third, throw a photo of your self, or some other emotional subject. Something to break up the text and give people something to look at and connect with (I really prefer a photograph of the photographer so people can connect with you right away).

Oh, this is a nit-picky thing, but people don’t specialize in 3 things. People specialize in one thing.

So you might change that to “I offer Newborn, Families and Wedding Photography…”

And last thing on the home page, there’s a lot of white space under the footer that seems kinda weird.

I lied, the last thing on the Home page is the Title Tag.

You have “Buffalo Wedding Photographer | Buffalo Wedding Photography | Buffalo Wedding Photography”

You just need one. I would do something like “Buffalo Wedding Photographer | Nicole Gatto”

Navigation:

In your Intro text on your home page, you mention Newborns and Families, but I don’t see any information related to that. So I would add that to your galleries for sure.

Get Wedding Info is actually a Contact page. But people won’t click that unless they’re interested in weddings. So people that may be interested in Newborns or Families have to hunt around and figure out how to contact you. You don’t want people to think when they’re on your website. You want to guide them through the site by their hand.

Ideally you’d have a page each for each one of your services with all the info all right there.

Galleries:

When I click on Galleries, it takes me to a page with essentially an error on it.

You can fix it by adding a # in the menu item link in the Menus. Then people can’t actually click on it.

Reviews:

Love that you have reviews on here. You can clean it up a little bit by putting a horizontal divider between each one. You can also get creative and add a link to their blog post (right now the photos link to themselves, but you can specify that they go to that client’s blog post instead as well.

Titles: The titles are small, and don’t give the gravitas that they should. I would increase the size so people know where they are when they’re on the pages and posts.

Contact page:

Contact form works fine. I like that you have a photo on the side. However you might consider something a little more emotional, it can even be a little girl at a wedding or something like that. Something that will put people over the top when it comes to contacting you.

Also the form is very Wedding centric, but you want more than wedding clients contacting you. Consider making it a little more generic, or use a contact form that has conditional fields like Gravity Forms. The conditional fields allow you to give options like Wedding, Newborn, Families, etc. And then a different set of questions drop down.

So pretty good start, but let’s get this website tightened up so people can find what they want and hire you. 🙂