Showit Templates: 5 Must-Haves When Choosing Yours

So many Showit templates, so little time! With thousands of Showit templates out there for you to consider, how do you know which one is best for you?

Besides loving the layout and aesthetic of your template (which we can help you customize, by the way!), what should you be looking for when it comes to Showit templates?

Check out these five must-haves to keep in mind as you start browsing.

Calls-to-Action (CTAs)

It’s great if your website is getting a lot of traffic, but do you know what’s not-so-great? Having a website with a lot of traffic that DOESN’T have any calls-to-action (CTAs) to capture the contact information and interest of these people who are poking around on your website.

Yikes!

CTAs show in a variety of ways:

• Social media icons to follow you online
• Buttons to schedule calls
• Contact forms to submit a question
• Email signup forms to join your email list
• Click-to-call hyperlinks

The most important thing is to make sure you have multiple CTAs available to account for a multitude of needs and preferences. People might not want to talk on the phone right away, but they feel comfortable filling out a contact form, so it’s best to have both options.

Your Showit template should have this as well. If people are coming to you, make sure you’re doing everything you can to keep them in your circle.

Multiple Page Layouts

Pages serve all sorts of purposes, so having the option to create multiple pages (and customize them!) is a must.

You may want to create a page for:

• Sharing more about you
• Highlighting publications where you’ve been featured
• Answering FAQs
• Breaking down your services, packages, offerings, etc.
• Freebies or resources you offer

And more. Being able to not only create new pages but also organize them how you want under your navigation bar is key! Your template should make it easy for people to find the information they’re looking for when they need it most.

Blog

Blogging may not be your favorite thing… but it’s an important thing! If you’re not convinced, think about this: SEO. Blogging is a gold mine for helping your website to creep further up search engine rankings when your ideal client is looking for a fabulous photographer like yourself to hire!

With that being said, the template you purchase should have the option to create a blog. You can use your blog to:

• Educate your audience on the work that you do
• Feature some of your work and your sessions
• Share valuable information related to photography

Even if you’re not super consistent with blogging, that’s OK–what’s most important is at least having a blog so you have a way to publish valuable content that will help to position you as an expert.

SEO Opportunities

What’s the point of having a beautiful site if no one is ever going to find you? That’s where SEO comes in!

Optimizing your website to make it easy for your dream clients to find your website; learn more about who you are, what you do, and how you can help them; and request more information about hiring you should be a top priority. Showit has various tools and features available to help improve your SEO, but it’s important for you to take advantage of those opportunities and ensure your template is optimized correctly for Google and other search engines to crawl your site.

This includes allowing you to:

• Add in keywords
• Write image descriptions
• Include meta tags
• Link back to other pages on your website

And more. We may be biased, but SEO is one of our favorite things to gush about… so if your template isn’t providing opportunities for you to increase your visibility on search engines, it’s a no-go in our mind!

Portfolio

Having various spots to showcase your portfolio throughout your website should be one of the very first things you look for in a template. Why is having this feature so important?

There are a variety of reasons:

1. It helps you to attract not only new clients but also the right clients. If light and airy editing is your jam, showcasing that editing style in your portfolio will defer anyone who’s looking for dark and moody editing. And if you want to attract more brand photography clients, showcasing more brand photos in your portfolio will do just that!
2. It portrays how talented you are. You want everybody’s jaw to drop when they look through your photos, right?!
3. It helps drive website traffic. Feeling like you’re running out of content to share, add more content to your portfolio and promote your new portfolio pieces on social media! You’ll instantly intrigue people and encourage them to head to your website to see more.

A portfolio is what helps to bring in the big bucks (besides many other things, of course!), so make sure you’re taking advantage of that through your template.

The most important thing to remember when looking through Showit templates is to focus on the functionality of the template, not the looks. Through our Showit Template Customization service, we can easily help you to change colors, fonts, images, copy, and more, so don’t stop yourself from buying a template just because the main color was purple when you really wanted pink.

Consider the features of the template and if it contains what you really want, and then you can bring in an expert (like us!) to tweak the rest for you.