Hello everybody! And welcome to another Flaunt Your Site website review. This week, we’re looking at Stefanie Cepeda‘s website. Stefanie is a wedding photographer in Vancouver. That’s in Canadia. The Mexico of the North.

So, Stefanie’s site is a bit basic. But it does have some good information on it. I would put some effort into actually having the design of your site thought out. With content layout and some actual visual design elements. It has the feeling that getting the content up was more important than how it would be interacted with.
Design is much more than making things pretty. It’s about finding the most appropriate home for the information you want to convey. It’s a dance between pretty and useful. If the balance is off, the power is lost.

The blurb down here is great. But I had to look a bit before I found out where you were located. A suggestion would be to have a Heading above the blurb that Said Stefanie Cepeda – Vancouver Wedding Photographer. That makes it un-missable for people.
In your Title Tag I’d suggest something similar. You want you name in there. “Documentary Wedding Photographer Victoria” doesn’t give your potential clients a good feeling about you as a business.
Back to the Blurb… I saw this on one of the last reviews, you start of with “Hello! I’m Stefanie.” But you don’t have your face there. So people still aren’t really related to you. Get a good headshot and put it right there aligned to the left so people can see your face and read your blurb at the same time.

The URL for this page should just be stefaniecepeda.com. Adding the stuff after it, seems like you’re trying to manipulate the search engines a bit. And it won’t likely be much help for you. Just go simple here.

The information you have is nice. I like that you have quotes, but with quotes, you want to credit the quotes. It’s important to know that those things have been said by real people. It’s a plus if you link to their blog posts so people can see those photos too.

I like that you tell people what to do next at the bottom of your text. I wouldn’t send them off your website though. They may not come back. So I would have your own reviews page, and send them there (you can link to the Google Reviews page from your review page if people want to see more or that those people actually said that). Keeping people on your site makes it easier for them, and you.

Portfolio:

I’ve never been a fan of side scrolling pages. If people don’t have a trackpad or a scroll mouse, it’s not obvious to them that they have to find the scroll bar at the bottom and scroll right.
You may want to be different, but scrolling is about 99% vertical on the internet. Don’t sacrifice usability for novelty.

Info:

I think you might want to break this up into a couple pages. An “About Me” and a “Wedding Info.” The Wedding Info could also be the main page. This would help for SEO purposes with the content. But I’d prefer to see a simple home page and then have a separate Wedding Info page (still good for SEO).

For the “About Me” page, I’d include the picture of you and your family. Continue to use this one too, but if you add one of you and your family, it’ll have potential brides gushing.

Contact:

A couple strange things I found here. The Title Tag (or SEO Title) is “Top 30 under 30 wedding photographer | Victoria” which doesn’t make sense at all for the Contact page.

The second thing is that the photo on the left is pretty far down the page. I’d bring that back up so people can see all that when they first get to the page.

Blog:

It’s good that you’re making content available to your potential brides. But since you’re a photographer, you’ll want to add compelling photos that will move people to want to use you as a photographer.
Info posts like this one are great, but they should be used as a vehicle for getting your work out there and visible. In a sense, we are selling ourselves, not photographs, but we have the benefit of affecting people’s emotions more than others through our photography. So if you do posts like this, drop in photos showing examples of meaningful ceremonies that you’ve photographed.

I’d also add a couple call to actions at the bottom of each blog post that tell people to contact you.

Mobile:

I didn’t look at the whole site on my phone, but I noticed that the menu is actually a “Hamburger Menu” (those three horizontal lined things), and it’s not in a very good place on the site. So I’m thinking this wasn’t a very well designed theme. I’d look into having that fixed, or looking for a well designed theme, or even hiring someone to design a site for you.
The best responsive menus are the ones that actually say “Menu” the Hamburger Menu is the worst thing ever in my opinion! 🙂

Conclusion:

Over all, you’ve got some good information and good photos. But I think you need a good website design to support that. Like I said above, take some time to look at the possibility of a new design, or new theme. Something that will really make people excited to work with you.