Imagine Photography is a family portrait studio near Marlborough, Wiltshire, in business since 2004. Its main studio is a 625 square foot barn conversion with room for family groups of up to 25, alongside an outdoor Garden Studio. It is one of the best-reviewed portrait photographers across Wiltshire, West Berkshire and North Hampshire.
A large share of the business starts as a gift. Someone buys a photoshoot for a family member, and that voucher becomes a booking. The website has two jobs: show the work, and sell the experience.
In more than twenty years of trading, the studio had worked with several different web designers, and for a time ran the website itself. As senior photographer Neil Withers puts it, it’s impossible to keep on top of a website when websites aren’t your speciality.
The result was a site that had fallen behind. Jobs the website should have done itself were spread across third-party apps, each one another subscription and another system to manage. Running the site took time that should have gone into photography and the rest of the business.
The site also had to do something difficult. The studio’s best sales tool is its photography, but hundreds of large, professionally shot images are exactly what slows a website down. And it needed to be found by the families within driving distance who search for a portrait photographer.
Customers buy a photoshoot gift online and receive a PDF voucher generated and sent automatically, with nobody at the studio needing to process it.
Enquiries and sign-ups go straight into the studio's email marketing and booking software, ready to act on.
Hundreds of large portraits display at full quality and load fast on every device.
Pages built to rank for portrait photography searches across Wiltshire, West Berkshire and North Hampshire.
Workflows and automations are now streamlined, and the studio has cut costs by dropping third-party apps whose jobs are now built into the site. Traffic has been rising steadily since launch, and the site has never been faster. Behind it sits a WordPress setup that the team can update themselves with confidence. Most importantly, Neil’s time is no longer tied up in the website, and goes back into the rest of the business.
Our business began in 2004 and in all those years there have been several different web designers we’ve used, even with a period of doing everything myself. It’s impossible to keep on top of it if all if websites aren’t your speciality. The decision to move our hosting and design to HITS has been absolutely fantastic and we couldn’t be happier! For the first time it feels like we’re working with a team that genuinely care, respond quickly and are happy to make amendments or demonstrate how we can make updates ourselves. Workflows and automations have been streamlined and savings have been made through no longer using third party apps as HITS has many things built in. Giles and his team’s knowledge has been invaluable and released my time to concentrate on other areas of the business. The back end uses a refined Elementor Wordpress setup that is intuitive and easy to adapt to. Crucially our traffic has been steadily increasing and our site speed has never been faster. If you are looking for a new Web Design Agency, look no further, contact HITS now!
