Kelly Kendall is a headshot and personal branding photographer based in Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin. While she’s been photographing and working in corporate marketing for the past 15 years, she has only recently ventured out on her own and opened up her Photography Studio.

When Kelly reached out to me, she had no website. She was contacting several web design companies and was getting pushback on the fact that she was starting from scratch (it’s obviously a lot easier to redesign something that already exists). The way I work on a website, however, goes so much deeper than a surface redesign, which meant that starting from scratch actually wasn’t a big deal.

And since Kelly was a fellow photographer, we already had a lot of things in common, along with the background knowledge of the business she’s trying to build. What people might not realize, however, is that every photographer is completely different. And this is so important… because you can’t just take one photographer’s website and apply it to someone else. That would be dishonest and also not a true representation of who that photographer actually is. The truth is, we all bring something different to our clients and to our businesses.

And the goal of the website (and the very important kickoff call and writing prompts that all of my clients have to fill out) is to discover what makes you different and to communicate it clearly to potential clients so that when someone reaches out to you they already know that you’re the right fit for them.

This is the approach I use for my own website and the approach I recommend for all my website clients. Following the StoryBrand Framework, we are able to clearly represent what makes each person and each business different - the benefits and qualities of the product that clients actually look for. Because when everyone and their cousin is a photographer, it’s really important to stand out.