Jared Polin: Jared Polin froknowsphoto.com, and yes my voice is slightly a little raspy after three days of shooting the froknowsphoto video guide the next guide that’s coming out. And today is the snow day so I would figure I’d catch up on making a Squarespace Rapid Fire Critique. And this time we’ve got Jonathan Tate photography and this is what his website says. It says the world is black and white through my eyes… so we will see if that is the case. So first things first his Squarespace page I believe the template that he’s using is called Wells. That is similar to the one that I use on mine, so that’s something that I definitely, definitely like. So one thing I first noticed up here, oh I want to turn off desktop icons for the time being.

One thing that I saw up here is its Jonathantatephotography.squarespace.com. Now that’s very difficult to send somebody to Squarespace I believe when you signup for a year gives you a free domain name. Now you don’t have to use them for the domain name. I use a company called Aplus.net. I believe it’s 12.99 a year or 10.99. I think it went upto 12.99 a year for a domain. I would purchase my own domain name separately so that you know in case you leave Squarespace one day you still have your domain. I don’t know how they do it, whether you get to keep it or you can transfer it, maybe they do. I’m sure they make it easy, but in this case, I like to purchase it on my own so I control it so I would like to see that you do that. Get Jonathan Tate photo probably opposed to photography that way it’s not so long. You got to look at how long domain names are. You got to try to make it easy for people to find your site and to spell it out, especially on mobile devices.

You would end up losing the Squarespace. Squarespace makes it really easy for you to map your domain name to wherever you have it. It’s just really simple. That’s what I did so that you can go to Jonathantatephotography.com. If you own that and get right to your website even if it’s stored on Squarespace’s server. So first things first, we’ve got or maybe second things second, I don’t know. We got Sacramento’s streets. We can pump through here boom. . I like how we rotate. I like how the images are huge. Remember that you can always drag look you see how drags in the screen resizes that is one of the major things I love about Squarespace that it does because no matter what size screen you have, you have a captive design here. It’s always going to change, and it makes it work.

You may not do it small like this, but hey, we’ve got it like this. One thing that I didn’t like about this you can arrow left, you can arrow right, and I just did it backwards, but you can’t arrow up and on my site let me show you what I like about arrowing up. You see how you have left, you have right, but you also have up that shows all the thumbnails. I love being able to see all of the images on the screen because that way I can be like, oh I want to see this picture and boom. Now again my website isn’t perfect. It’s not the best. It’s just an idea, that I love having the ability to see the thumbnails. And I think a lot of people do as well so as we go down here we’ve got. What does one say? It says Sean this guy Sean, you go through you got two, three pictures. Couple actually not bad, so not a bad set. Up, up, what is this, why is there a color picture on your site? See, this is one thing you either going to have to do or not do.

If you say that the world is black and white through your eyes, then every single image on your page you got to live by that. That needs to be your thing. If that’s your style and what you’re going for then everything on your website Jonathan should be black and white especially with a tagline like that. I don’t think that’s too much to say especially if you’re going to say it then, then own it. Then be that guy that sees the world through black and white, so I like this scene. I like what’s going on here. What I would consider doing on the site here is maybe making these more bold so that you can see them and not just when you highlight them. I like it bold so it stands out and I can see it from a distance. Also maybe have a section called photo stories or portrait stories where you put this guy, and then this Relic 45 which is a band I believe. Same thing have that under photo stories or portrait stories or something along those lines, but I know that I went through here as well, and started to see color pictures and that throws me off, especially with the tagline, so that’s something that I would consider doing.

Automotive, let’s click on automotive and see what we have. We’ve got one picture alright so it’s not a portfolio with one picture. It’s just a picture maybe you should have a miscellaneous section for certain images if you’re not ready to put up more about automotive because it kind of is like if somebody is coming to your site to hire you and they’re looking at everything else so they want your portrait so they come up to automotive and they see one shot. It’s like why? Why do I only have one shot here? So either hold off on putting this up yeah I wouldn’t even put it up at all until you have more automotive shots, or have a miscellaneous section of my personal choices, my fun shots where you just have a miscellaneous area where the images go. So we’ve got the Homeless Project, which I went through earlier. I think its some very nice images on here.

Again I would like to see the thumbnail. This is great. Very nice in black and white. I’d move this up higher, maybe under Sacramento stories. This is or personal stories or personal projects. This is really – it’s very powerful and there’s not that many images here. I’d like to see at least 15 to 20 pictures in a portfolio that you put up here. I rather see less sections, but more solid images. These are solid images, but I want to see just a little bit more of them before you put other things up so we click on animals. And again, we just have one picture. It shouldn’t be here like this, you need to get that into the miscellaneous or have a set of animals. I could say 10 pictures alright. I wouldn’t say go less than 10 pictures, when you’re putting up a section.

Through the looking glass blog, I like that you have a blog on here as long as you update it more often, and you just keep people coming back for more. Blog posts are very important on a photo website. People come back, what do you think I started? When I started Jaredpolin.com it was with a Squarespace at the time and I had it in a blog style, and I put up my portfolio, and I put up my images, but I also had a blog and people started to follow it for whatever reason. I don’t know why I wasn’t very good back then, with making videos, but people just they came back because there was a place to see content and so updating stuff like this about your personal stories or hey look, I went photograph the homeless guys and I did an interview or here’s my story, and here’s what I feel. People start to get a personal appreciation for that and they feel attached to what you’re doing and then they’re going to come back for more, so then we’ve got shop.

And shop when we click on it is empty. There’s nothing here so because there’s nothing here, you got to turn it off on your end. You don’t want the public facing side to show a blank page, especially like this, where it says shop or you – if you’re going to sell something, put it in there. If not nicks it, get rid of it. Then we click on contact and you have your contact form. I like contact forms like this. I also don’t mind sometimes leaving the e-mail address in there. Maybe it’s not linkable or clickable, but it gives people the ability to see it and send an e-mail if they would like, but this is very simple to use very easy to put together, maybe have more of a bio. I don’t see an About Me page. It’s always nice to know more about you instead of my name is Jonathan Tate, a local photographer from Sacramento.

Well, let me ask you something what makes you a – yes you’re local there, but you’re not local to me because I’m in Philadelphia. Own it, drop the local, you’re a photographer from Sacramento, California willing to travel the world to go take the photos that you want to see in black and white. I don’t know I just came up with that off the top of my head, but if you see the world through black and white you know my name is Jonathan Tate, a photographer from Sacramento, California, capturing images of the world in black and white. If you need me to travel around, if you need me to travel anywhere I am fully capable and ready to go, so contact me here or leave your e-mail address and things like that. So those that’s marketing, that’s a little bit of salesmanship right there.

You’re selling yourself. Don’t sell yourself short as just a local photographer that comes across as saying well I guess you’re not global, you’re not able to go anywhere else and I’m not saying you’re not. I’m just pointing that out as something that I would work on. I would come up with a saying, you know you have your slogan about the black and white, but be you know be more open to – you’re a Photographer and capitalize Photographer by the way. Capitalize the P in photographer. You are a Photographer. You are from Sacramento California, but I am traveling, I will – I do travel the world and I’m ready to go when you want me to capture your black and white images so I think I spend enough time on that, but I hope that helps you guys out there. You’ve got your link to your Facebook and Twitter. I love seeing that. You probably should have an Instagram as a photographer these days, so that people can follow you there. The more places people can follow and engage in what you’re doing, the more they’re going to want to come back for more. That’s how you start building the brand and the brand awareness and people are going to start seeing your work and talk about it, and share it out there.

So the photos are very nice and black and white. I like what’s going on. This is a very clean theme. There’s not much that I would change as of right now. I’d like to see drop-down menus of sorts if you have got multiple photo stories. I would see a little bit less here because once you get rid of automotive, once you get rid of animal, and once you get rid of shop it kind of condenses down and is much better than where it’s at now because those just clog it up, and they don’t really show you anything. Your photo stories are pretty cool. I like them, but let’s work on this left hand side and maybe have some drop-down menus where you put miscellaneous projects, animals and just put the photos in there, so not bad at all guys. This is a Squarespace Rapid Fire Critique. If you haven’t checked out squarespace.com yet go to squarespace.com/fro and if you well, you could signup for a 14 day free trial. And after that, if you decide that you want to signup for a subscription use the code fro tube at checkout, and that’s going to give you 10% off your first order so that means if you signup for one month you’re going to get 10% off for that one month or if you signup for a year you’re going to get 10% off that entire year which is I think something like $84 for the year that is not bad, and that includes the hosting and all of the customer support 24 hours a day. I like it. Check it out for yourself, for those 14 days free trial.

If you want to submit your rapid fire critiques you can do so, leaving them here underneath this YouTube video as a comment. I will see those links, and there’s only so many of these I can make, but I will keep trying to make them and leave some comments with what you want to see me do with some of these critiques. So there you guys have it. Go to Squarespace.com/fro use code fro tube to save 10% off and that is about it. Jared Polin froknowsphoto.com, see ya.