livebooks success stories

I love how liveBooks made the design of my site exactly what I wanted. It is easy to organize my images via their drag-and-drop lightbox, and my clients have convenient and secure access to their files with the built-in password protected client section. liveBooks provides an elegant and integrated showcase for my portfolio online.

As a director and photographer, I needed a website that could host both video and print. liveBooks was the obvious choice. I’m constantly generating new work and it is important that I be able to manage my own content from wherever I am in the world. I also appreciate that liveBooks is constantly developing, upgrading and adapting new technologies to their website templates. And liveBooks is extremely user friendly. It allows me to keep my websites looking fresh and up to date. I especially love the new Scaler sites. In my business, so much of the bidding process happens digitally, so it’s important to have a strong website that is easy to navigate and makes a statement about my particular sensibilities.

I recently completed a multimedia public art project for the City of Culver City in which I had created a series of photographic diptychs and directed a film called “The Secret Life of Swimmers.” When I was asked by the City to create a dedicated website that could function as an online virtual gallery for the work, I went straight to liveBooks.

If you can think of it, they can implement it. I’ve been extremely happy with liveBooks.

What’s not to love about liveBooks? I chose liveBooks because, uploading and managing content is as easy as it gets. Before that, I had a pretty ordinary static site that was a nightmare to keep up to date, taking hours of my precious time to just upload a couple of images. Now new work can be uploaded and tagged within minutes using the well designed, easy to use editSuite. Adding SEO keywords is simple, intuitive and crucial to help search engines find your site. And now with the recent introduction of Scaler, which allows for bigger images that scale to fit the viewer’s monitor, my work has much more impact and is displayed on the web in the best possible way.

Being a designer as well as a photographer, customising and branding my site to ensure consistency with my company identity is essential. The liveBooks support team made implementing my company logo and colour palette effortless.

I’ve been using liveBooks for less than 2 years and in that time my business has increased three-fold! I can’t see myself moving to another website company any time soon.

I initially chose liveBooks because I saw many of my respected colleagues using liveBooks websites, and I’ve always thought the sites looked so polished and modern. This was exactly the look I needed to tie together my logo, promo cards and portfolios. I have been with liveBooks for almost three years, and just completely overhauled and updated my old liveBooks site to a new Scaler site. The results are amazing! My images look so sharp on any size monitor, and the whole process was smooth and relatively painless. liveBooks support staff are very helpful, and very quick to respond.

I feel I have to stay fresh and on the cutting-edge when it comes to the design and marketing of my photography and liveBooks lives up to those standards.

liveBooks is valuable to me because I can very easily manage all my content. As an artist being able to keep my work current without having to be, or need a developer is important. I wanted a custom designed website that is elegant and simple so as not to compete with my work. After working with liveBooks’ design team I think I’ve achieved that goal. It is a great value for the money.

Being young in the photography industry isn’t easy. So, having a professional web presence is key. liveBooks offers professional websites that not only showcase your images beautifully, but increase website views and business. Now I am not just saying this because I can, I know from experience. After switching to liveBooks from my previous site, I noticed an increase in website traffic in a matter of hours!

If you think you can sign up for a free site to display your images on think again. Viewers will look at your site, and even before it is finished loading, they will leave because it looks cheap. Now that doesn’t mean your images are bad. They could be amazing, but they are just not presented well. liveBooks’ websites are based on presenting your images in the best way possible. Their sites will help you grow as a photographer and build your business… seriously!

Why liveBooks? Because I’ve always trusted their instincts. With Scaler they’ve once again merged great technology and design, allowing both you and your clients to maneuver effortlessly through your site with big impact. I would rate our relationship with them as one of our most important in our day to day mix of doing business at the studio.

Three years ago I decided that as a young photographer, having a professional looking site was vital to my future success in this industry. Especially if I wanted to be taken seriously and to stand out from the crowd. After a week of browsing the photographers who inspire me most, it was no question that liveBooks had exactly what I needed for my website. The clean and simple layout was exactly what I was looking for and it fit my high school senior budget well. The add-ons were extremely simple to have done. The customer service turn around time was extremely quick. Within no time I had the exact site I needed to show my portfolio.

Over time, my portfolio and shooting abilities grew. As well as my business and career. Shooting documentary, portrait, sport and advertising, on top of personal work, my site showcased a large range of what I had shot. Pretty soon my portfolio site was too content heavy, making it somewhat intimidating or confusing to my potential portrait clients. I wanted them to have a simple experience on my site while not having to go through multiple sets of images that were not relevant to their interests, just to find my portrait work.

With that in mind I decided it was time to create a second liveBooks site for just my portrait work. The new site was designed just for my portrait clients and contains nothing but different samples of my portrait work. Having a site dedicated just for portraiture, gave me a large amount of options I hadn’t had with the single website. It gave me the opportunity to show a lot more of my portrait work and categorize it into simple genres. While the included video page allows me to share behind the scenes videos to show my clients why my shoots are all about. This in return, made it easier for my new clients to see my portrait work as well as creates a more fun and informative interaction. It also freed up my old site to contain just my portfolio of my strongest work, without mixing my portrait business into things. Having a second site dedicated to just my portrait business has made been beneficial from the first day it went live and my only regret is not doing it sooner.

At the age of 19 (20 in a week!) having a professional site has been vital to my success. I am happy that liveBooks has been there for me. I would strongly suggest liveBooks to any and all young photographers, aspiring photographers or professional photographers alike who want to have the best website on the net to display their work.

I see my website as a sign along the Information Superhighway (to coin a worn-out cliché). It’s a very important marketing tool. I use my site as a place to showcase my vision. A liveBooks website is like a custom-made glove. It fits perfectly. It’s easy to operate and easy for clients to navigate — yet it has loads of bells and whistles that have never let me down.
Several years ago a friend talked me into buying a cheap website template so I could build my own Flash website. What a mistake. I found myself buying books on how to fully upload and operate my site. I was staying up all night wrestling with an unseen foe. It took several weeks to have an Internet presence. And things went downhill from there.
I had a meeting with a group of Art Directors at a magazine in Phoenix. I showed the ADs some prints then directed everyone to my website. As they clicked, multiple blank windows would uncontrollably pop up — with no way of stopping them. What an embarrassment. Who knows how many thousands of dollars I lost because I took a cheap shortcut. They were polite as they showed me the door.
Less than twenty four hours later, I had a liveBooks website.
What I like about liveBooks is that it’s fully customizable and it can be updated in a matter of minutes. In the beginning I worked with a liveBooks designer to create a beautiful presence. A few years later, with the help of another designer, I was able to easily update the look and feel of my business.
My site works behind the scenes for me, as well. Search Engine Optimization is an issue with Flash Websites. That isn’t the case with liveBooks. Their sites use both Flash and HTML. And because of an image’s metadata, it’s also fully searchable and trackable with Google Analytics. Clients can download pdfs that are easily emailed and I can create private galleries for them (type the word “wet” and login!).
It’s important to invest in your photography. It’s your business. Competition is fierce. Why put your best work on a free blog? I’ve found that shortcuts are rarely shortcuts to success, often they are quick roads to disaster.
In short, liveBooks offers an easy-to use, professional website that communicates that I am serious about my photography. Clients see me as credible — which allows me to keep doing what I do – which is taking pictures.