As a nursery school photographer, you will probably specialise in photographing children under the age of five within their school environment.
As nursery schools tend to cater to a small number of children that attend the toddler group either in the morning or afternoon, most nursery school photoshoots are organised on a first-come-first-served basis rather than a regimented production line.
Generally, toddler group images are more casual and natural than your typical school photo, and many nursery school photographers choose to have no set pose for the children as being so young, this can make things difficult.
It's also become increasingly popular for many nursery school photographers to offer sibling portraits as well as friendship group portraits alongside the traditional individual child photographs.
Your website is your business's virtual shop window and therefore, should reflect your personal style and be designed to attract your target customer base. Many nursery school photographers aim to create a timeless and elegant website design that will appeal to their target clientele of traditional nursery or primary schools, while other nursery school photographers aim to create a modern and fun website design that will appeal to more relaxed local nursery schools and toddler groups. Consider an easy-to-read typeface, and light, bright portfolios showcasing portraits of happy children and images of them enjoying themselves at school.
Many nursery school photographers also wish to give their website visitors a bit of "wow factor" to display why potential schools should invest as them as their school photographer. The banner links page is just one way in which this can be achieved. By displaying a beautiful, full-width image at the top of any web page, you can create an immediate impression on clients.
Another way to impress clients would be with a blurb page. A blurb page allows you to display a full-width image behind a box of text, with the option to include an access code box. This makes a particularly beautiful client area page.
On a practical note, it is important for nursery school photographers to implement the appropriate privacy settings. There are two options that we would recommend for nursery photographers - primarily to make all your collections "private" and secondly, to set all collections to "preview only". When a collection is set to "private" only an access code box will appear and therefore all images within the collection will only be viewable by those with the correct access code. On the other hand, when a collection is set to "preview only", an access code will display but with one collection image alongside it. This image is selected by you, the photographer, and therefore could be something other than a child portrait, for example, the school badge or crest.
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Social media is a great tool for business and we would highly recommend linking any business social profiles that you have to your website. Not only does this make it easier for clients to find your social media profiles and therefore follow your business but also is great for your search engine optimisation. You can link to your social media profiles anywhere on your website but generally this is done in either your website footer, website header or on your contact page.
Pop-Up Boxes
A pop-up box displays on your website periodically, according to your chosen programmed schedule. For example, it can display on every page on your website or just a selected one, such as your home page. A pop-up box is usually designed to initiate a particular action from the visitor as well as isolate a visitor's attention to what you consider the most important message. For example, to encourage a visitor to purchase a product, book a session, spend over a certain amount, follow your business on social media or sign up to your mailing list.
Notification Bars
Notification bars have become increasingly popular and commonplace, namely as either an announcement bar or a cookie policy.
An announcement bar is generally used to display currently important information to your visitors and should be updated fairly regularly. Announcement bars could be used to display information such as flash sales, Christmas announcements, holiday breaks, scheduled maintenance, holiday opening times, other important announcements (i.e. Covid-19 pandemic, GDPR etc).
Alternatively, a cookie bar is used to link to your cookie and privacy policy so that visitors can read, should they want to, how you handle their information and data. A cookie policy is required on any website using persistent cookies i.e. if you are offering gift vouchers to customers.
If in doubt, we would recommend that you always display a cookie policy, just to be on the safe side!
If you specialise in portraits of children, it's inevitable that there will be the occasional snotty nose, dribbly chin or bruised arm which of course, ends up in the photograph. As a nursery school photographer you will be taking hundreds of images and therefore, cannot be expected to retouch or edit each individual photo.
Proof delay allows you to "hold" orders for 1-28 days giving you the chance to review cropping, retouch files or upload your best hi-res originals. Once you're finished making changes, you can "approve" the order and immediately send it for printing. However, if you take no action, your order will automatically be fulfilled after the specified number of days, so there's no chance of anything being forgotten!
Many nursery school photographers are now asking additional checkout questions when a customer checks out. The most common additional question is asking the parent's permission to retouch the images in the order.
Once you have completed a nursery school photo session, parents will want to view their child's images as well as purchase prints and other products. There are two main ways to manage this process. The first is through the nursery school itself. Once you have uploaded the images taken at the nursery, you can contact the school or playgroup and inform them on how parents can log in to their collections as well as pass on unique access codes for each parent. Alternatively, you can communicate directly with the parents if they are attending the photo session with their child, by handing out access codes there and then.
When it comes to selling to your customers, you can sell anything in an online shop with theimagefile including physical products (such as traditional prints and other photo products), stand-alone products, digital downloads, and services.