livebooks success stories

We have fully embraced multimedia and social media and our liveBooks site does a wonderful job of allowing us to incorporate it all into one neat package. liveBooks puts a lot of work into delivering a strong design with ease of use, and I’m thankful they’ve made it so easy on photographers like myself.

As a wedding and portrait photographer, our clients love two things: simplicity and eye candy. liveBooks provides us with an invaluable tool to showcase our work in a simple, dynamic platform. And when it comes to managing our online presence, it absolutely couldn’t be easier.

When I was looking for a website, it seemed like a no-brainer to work with a company that also works with many of the top professionals in the photography business. I have to say that working with liveBooks has been fantastic! I had very particular ideas for exactly how I wanted the layout and interface to work and look. Bert Hall and the liveBooks creative team worked with me fulfilling EVERY one of my requests and providing insight and help when needed. Throughout our collaborations I experienced nothing but the best in customer service. The end result is a clean and professional looking website from which my photos shine through. It is clear that liveBooks offers superior cutting-edge marketing platform with a plethora of portfolio showcasing tools!

I decided to go with a liveBooks custom designed website after doing a lot of research. Most importantly, I needed a site I could update myself. I wanted a design to represent my work in a way that is clear and modern, yet traditional. My liveBooks designer listened to my input and considered what I wanted very carefully. I was amazed! My new site was up and running in no time. While the recession hit the wedding industry particularly hard my website has helped me exceed my projections for the year. The feedback I receive from clients and photographers about my site is universally positive – it’s the perfect marriage of photography and design. I highly recommend liveBooks as a complete solution that will give you a huge competitive advantage. Scaler has taken my website and brand to a whole new level. The impact is instant and gorgeous. It was an investment in my business that I’m glad I made!

In 2006, when I was searching for a designer to build my first high-end, professional website, liveBooks quickly jumped out of the (crowded) pack. Their elegant simplicity was a breath of fresh air compared to everything else that I was seeing at the time. The images, as they should, came first and foremost instead of the typical overly complicated intro pages and clumsily built navigation interfaces. The site they created back then was exactly what I asked for and expected – prominent, large images and intuitive, minimal, aesthetically pleasing navigation, with tons of user options. I loved it from day one and it served me well for over 4 years. As average desktop screen sizes grew larger and larger over the years, those large images were, well, no longer quite so large. As I began to look at my options for a redesign in spring 2011, liveBooks introduced their new Scaler sites (right on time!). My recently launched Scaler site has, once again, exceeded my expectations while keeping with the philosophy that brought me to liveBooks in the first place – BIG images, now big enough to fill even the largest screen, along with an elegant and clean navigation system that gets visitors where they want to go without excessive bells and whistles. The best portfolio websites are the ones that allow you to see big, sharp images up on the screen as simply as you can flip through a hard copy portfolio, and liveBooks delivers in spades.

If priority #1 for a portfolio site is to get your best images out there for the world to see with ease, next on the list is having a unique Bio/About page. A great bio is something that is so often overlooked and put off until later by photographers. For many of us, it’s second nature to shoot, shoot and shoot some more. We have a great desire to quickly share those images. However, when it comes to talking about ourselves and writing a few paragraphs about what we do, we often just toss up something generic about our education and qualifications and how “your special day” is so important to us, etc. This is a huge lost opportunity! Your About page is your chance to add a little extra personality to your work that will help you to stand out from your competition. Imagine, as a potential client, that you’re looking at a photographer for your wedding day – you’ve narrowed it down to 2 photographers with comparable talents at the same price range, but one has a boring, generic About page and the other shows some personality and makes you laugh. Who are you going to choose? Clients are getting more and more savvy every day, and with a generic bio you risk looking like someone merely going through the motions rather than a photographer full of ideas and energy who is ready to deliver amazing photos. Don’t be afraid of posting something a little silly and offbeat! With a sea of generic bios out there, a little something different is a breath of fresh air.

In addition, from a photographer’s standpoint, having a unique About page works great as an extra level of pre-qualification. We all know that the best, most rewarding shoots are the ones where the client shares our tastes and sensibilities and therefore trusts our vision and judgment. By having a unique About page, you will attract clients that see the world as you do and also weed out clients who may not be the best fit. I can safely say that people who mention my About page in their initial contact are almost always on the same page as me when it comes to stylistic choices for their shoot. In this age of fast, fast, and faster, with so many decisions being made based on what can be found online, a unique About page is critical to help you stand out from the masses.

I have been in business for 25 years and can honestly say that having a website is a must in the world as we know it today. A website is an introduction to you and your work. It is important to have the right colors, feel and emotion to captivate your viewer. I am an artist. I have a specific way I want my site to look. With my vision and liveBooks’ design knowledge, we put our heads together and made it happen.
The ability to integrate other services into my website makes my business work much more efficiently. When a client fills out my contact page shootQ starts working for me. I’ll have all my questions answered before talking to my prospective client. My website makes my life and my clients life easier.
I have been with liveBooks for 10 years and I have had a few site changes. Each time the process has been professional. I get a return phone call promptly and answers to my questions in a reasonable time. As a professional Photographer our business is personable. I like that liveBooks gets to know their clients on a first name bases, you are not known as a number. We are all going to fast in this world and it is nice to actually know who has been that helpful voice on the other end of the phone. My long standing relationship with liveBooks is proof that they are a valuable business partner.
liveBooks has been a brand name in the photography industry for many years… and they have always been ahead of the curve, helping to make our businesses grow with all that they offer. I am so grateful I found liveBooks 10 years ago. I have never looked further!

We’ve been liveBooks customers for over 5 years. So when we started our re-branding project last year we knew we wanted stay with liveBooks for our main web presentation. Our friend J Sandifer and the entire liveBooks design team worked tirelessly (and patiently) with us and our brand designer, Melanie Halim, for several months while we perfected and incorporated the new brand design in our upgraded custom liveBooks website.
We love the flexibility the liveBooks editSuite gives us and how easy the editSuite is to use! That coupled with great customer service and tech support will keep us liveBooks clients for quite some time to come. Thanks liveBooks!

Customizing my liveBooks preDesigned website could not have been easier! I was a bit worried about how long it would take to get up and running but I was thrilled to discover with liveBooks as part of my team it is was super quick and easy! I received fast responses from support and when my customized design idea was a bit off they offered me advice on how I could make it better – how great is that! Now I have a reliable, SEO friendly, awesome looking custom site with a company that I trust!

I chose liveBooks two-and-half years ago, and I haven’t looked back. As a photographer, my images are my calling card, and liveBooks realizes this. That’s why they’ve made their sites so photo-friendly, allowing us, the photographer, to have complete control over the images that appear on our site, and they’ve given us the ability to update and make changes to the images whenever and wherever. But this is only the tip of the iceberg – I’ve come to realize that my liveBooks website’s clean design allows my photos to do the talking. liveBooks maximizes the look and feel of a photographer’s site so that the images command all of the attention rather than letting distracting graphics get in the way of the photos. Add in liveBooks’ super friendly, prompt customer service, and I consider them a partner well worth doing business with for the foreseeable future.

I love that my liveBooks website allows me to edit my website whenever I want. There is no waiting for designers and web gurus to change my images for me. It’s also easy to experiment with new galleries because my site comes with unlimited portfolios. Thanks for helping me build a great site!