You only have one chance to make a first impression on potential clients that land on your photography website. Are you making the right impression? Are you 100% confident that the images of potential clients of yours will see when they first arrive on your website will compel them to either love what you do or think, hmm, this photographer isn't for me. If not, stick around and I'm going to show you how to choose images for your website galleries. There are so many moving parts to being a photographer. There's always an ever-growing to do list and it seems like sometimes we treat our website portfolios as one and done. We've done it, there it is and it takes us months, often years to revisit that website portfolio and update it. I think it's so important to go through our portfolios once, if not twice, the seasons, every six months and make sure that we're communicating the right message to our couples that land on our website. Because what we often forget is that sometimes our website is the only touch point and certainly the first touch point of a potential client will see. They're not necessarily clicking over to our blog on our Instagram and seeing our recent shoots. They're seeing what we have said. This is our curated portfolio. That's what they're viewing and that's why how they're deciding whether or not to contact us. So do you have a list of words that you want your photography or that you hope your photography expresses? If you do, that's great. If you don't, what I'm going to have you do is go through your website portfolio right now or a wedding blog post you love. If you know your website's out of date, don't bother going there. Go to a website or sorry, a wedding blog post that you love and as you scroll through the images, take note of what kind of feelings, emotions and words come to mind. One of these images reminds you of. And start to make a big list. You can cross off the ones you don't like later. For me, some of these words would be joyful, genuine, candid, smiley, authentic, bright, colorful. Those words describe, but I want my work to feel like and what I want my work to look like. So now that you have these words, you can go back through your website gallery and ask yourself every image that is on your website. Do I want to recreate this image in the future and does this image fit with the words of my brand of my business? What I mean by this is if you have a website or sorry, an image on your website of a wedding party, say jumping, the classic wedding party jumping shot, and you don't like taking jumping wedding party shots. Why is it on your website? Like be ruthless. Look through your website images and think if a client came to me and said, we love that image, we want to do that on our wedding day. Would you want to do it or would you be kind of annoyed? That is not your client's fault. That's your fault because you're showing them. Well, you don't want to create. So we need you to the offset. We need to make sure that the images we're showing our clients on our website is 100% the work we want to create and the ideal work that our client would love. I'm sure if you're on the right track when it comes to images in your website gallery, you're going to want to grab my freebie. So you can head to jamegellinewatson.com slash gallery audit. This is going to be a great checklist that you can work through once or twice a season as you update your website. It's going to give you a list of criteria that you can check mark as you complete it and we're going to make sure that website is attracting the right kind of client. When choosing your website images, I recommend less is more. Clients are not going to look through 80 images in a website gallery. They're going to click through about 20, maybe 25. So be very selective when it comes to these wedding galleries. Know that you need to put your best work at the very front. So that means on your homepage. Then that means the first five images of your website gallery. You always have to be asking yourself as they progress further in the gallery. If they if my client only got this far, is this a best representation of my work and what I love to do. If not, things need to be rearranged. So for me personally, if I go onto Sharifers website and the first image and their wedding gallery is a shoe shot, you better be all about shoes. You love details. Your bride is obsessed with shoes. We'll definitely have a designer shoes at her wedding. For me, that's not really my bride. That's not really my lanes. I'm not going to have a shoe shot in the first five images in my wedding gallery. Instead, I'm going to have joyful, smiley, bright and groomed photos. So see what I'm saying there? We need to be analyzing this along the way. What is the best for our specific audience? Thanks for being here today. If you needed that checklist, link again. It's jmedalainwatson.com. Slash gallery audit. Download that work through your website right now and then leave a comment with a link to your website. I would love to check it out and give my feedback. So thanks for being here. Please like, subscribe and comment and I will see you next week.