WPPI has extended to PhotoOne (and other vendors) 10 FREE FULL REGISTRATIONS to WPPI 2010. If you are planning on going to WPPI 2010, and haven’t registered yet, give us a call and we will get you a FREE REGISTRATION.

WPPI makes it clear that they will not provide refunds — so only apply if you are planning on attending but haven’t registered yet. PhotoOne will be in Booth #1315 at WPPI.

We have heard from various clients that at their State or local level a sales tax change is scheduled for January 1, 2010.

Please check and make sure you know what is planned in your area. If, in fact, a change is planned for January 1, 2010, please review this blog post and video for a quick tutorial on how to make the change in PhotoOne.

‘Tis the Monday of the biggest holiday week,
shopping and scurrying — all those last minute tweaks.

We at PhotoOne are so grateful to all,
and look forward to celebrating and staying away from the mall!

Thank you for making it another good year at PhotoOne. PhotoOne looks forward to assisting you and your studio by providing a continued commitment to our studio management software in 2010.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. PhotoOne will be available until 2 pm EST on Thursday December 24th and December 31st. We will be closed December 25th through December 28, and there will be no emergency support. We will also be closed January 1st and will provide emergency support as normal starting January 2. Enjoy your family and friends during the holidays.

We discussed website load speed back on September 17, 2009 in the blog post Website ? and how important it is to a visitor’s overall experience. Although a bit extreme, the statistic I cited in that post was that ” . . . Google has found that as little as a millisecond in load time for their pages can be the difference of millions of incremental dollars.”

In an effort to continue to evolve best practices, Google is adding load speed to their SEO algorithm. January 2010 is the rumored start for this additional factor making the optimization of page loading more important than ever.

I like this change by Google to the algorithm. On the one hand, it will make for more page-loading efficient sites resulting in a better visitor experience and retention — on the other hand, it will lower the use of bandwidth and possibly hosting fees. As the larger companies/websites become more load efficient our expectations will shift and we’ll expect the same performance from both big and small.

A free tool that we use at PhotoOne is WebSiteOptimization. It is setup to allow you to enter your sites URL and submit for diagnosis. As outlined on the bottom of their Homepage, the website speed test will “ . . . help you find out if slow pages are hurting your business. It will test page size, composition, download speed and point out some of the things that need to be done to increase your on-line competitiveness.”

For all of us who hate waiting in lines(*), go ahead and check out WebSiteOptimization. If you haven’t had your site tuned-up in a couple of years, it might be a good New Year’s resolution.

(*) fun fact: during your lifetime you will have spent roughly 5 years in a line.

A very Happy Thanksgiving to you and your families from PhotoOne. PhotoOne will be open all day Wednesday, closed Thursday and open all day Friday.

I did want to leave you with a few holiday statistics as we move into high gear for the holiday season.

1. 79% of consumers intend to utilize the Internet as a tool to help with holiday shopping.
2. Technology will be the most expensive single purchase followed by gift cards averaging $270.
3. Price discounts are the top motivator for getting consumers into the checkout line.
4. Free shipping and/or a free gift with purchase are also good motivators.
5. 53% of the consumers said that they would spend more or the same as last year.
6. 83% of the consumers said that they were “joyful” or “even-keeled” going into the holidays.

These stats are from American Express Spending and Saver Tracker. There are many more stats but these are the one’s that stood out for me as I think about the photography business and PhotoOne.

Happy Thanksgiving.

As most of you heard, Microsoft released their new operating system, Windows 7, last week and received a lot of favorable reviews. One thing is clear from the discussions is that Vista was a real disappointment and created a lot of computer heartache. Our studio management software will be happy to move on. A successful release of Windows 7 and a new and more intuitive interface is critical to Microsoft and their perceived position in the global software arena.

The typical protocol around a new operating system release is roughly an 18 month wait before it it is rolled out in a major way. This allows some of the major kinks to be worked out and triaged before a broader deployment takes place. We did a little testing at PhotoOne while Windows 7 was in beta and had a very positive experience. Now that Windows 7 has been released to the marketplace we will do a more complete testing. As you transition your studios from older operating systems to Windows 7 please provide our technical support team feedback. It will be helpful for our developer and technical support teams as you experience the new Windows 7.

I have also heard that there are going to be some great deals on hardware to go along with the new software. This may be a great time to look at new hardware for your studio and realize the operating benefits of upgraded software and hardware.

This is the perfect way to get your year off to a great start — Mystic 5 hosted by Walter vanDusen.

This is the 5th year for Walter’s event hosted in Mystic.  The first year had 44 photographers and this year there will be over 300 with a rocking speaker line-up.  The Sunday and Monday evening presentations include Joe McNally — “Big Flash, Small Flash” and Jerry Ghionis — “Reinventing the Wedding Album.”     These are two photographers you won’t want to miss!

Walter and Mystic 5 will provide a great experience at a very attractive price point.  The three-day agenda is an opportunity to hear and interact with first-class speakers and network with other wedding photographers.  This is a fun and easy way to ring in the New Year — PhotoOne will see you there.

We’re introducing this new P1Action logo to highlight those blogs that include a quick tip about functions that you can use to enhance your PhotoOne experience. For example, we’ve had lots of questions about how to insert images into emails so next Tuesday we’ll post a blog on this topic. So when you see the P1Action logo check out the blog for easy and helpful tips for you and your studio!

1st Point:

Wow, we are coming up on our 75th blog post – that is roughly 35,000 words. You probably would have never guessed that your studio management software company could be so wordy. Go ahead and subscribe to our blog!

Please check your email inbox for a verification message from “FeedBurner Email Subscriptions”, the service that delivers email subscriptions for PhotoOne. You will need to click a link listed in this message to activate your subscription. If you don’t get the message in 10 minutes or less, please check your Junk folder.

2nd Point:

We have started to put our client’s names and website links up on our blog and at this point we have about 100 clients listed from the United States, Australia and New Zealand. We are trying to get up another 5 to 10 a day which should keep us busy for the balance of the year.

If you really like the post or it provokes some thought, leave a comment.

Here we are again, coming up on Labor Day and it’s starting to feel a little like fall in New England with temperatures dropping into the 40’s at night. With a short holiday week coming up I thought I would share with you a couple of fun, new things our clients are doing.

As I discussed in my last blog post this is a great time of year to explore new avenues and ideas for your business. Kay Eskridge is clearly ahead of the curve and has several new business enhancements up and running. Kay has run a successful portrait studio business in Phoenix, Arizona since 1986 and during that time she has created lots of energy with events like Birthdays Rock, Girls Night In, When I was one, two, three . . . and Paws for a Cause. When I spoke with her the other day she said that she has recently introduced two new websites in addition to her current site: Images by Kay.

Kay has put together a new site called Learn Grow Succeed to promote and develop opportunities for speaking engagements. Kay has often been involved in educational and motivational programming to photography associations across the country and it’s a good time in her career to reengage in something she enjoys — so Learn Grow Succeed acts as a virtual resume and aids in generating ideas. Kay will be speaking at the WPPI Road Trip in Dallas on the 28th of this month.

Kay has also decided to leverage her great studio with her new site Celebrate Sexy. Kay and her staff have created a comfortable studio environment in which to capture images of a woman’s more private personality.

I also spoke with Kash Johnson who, along with his wife Sherry, moved to a new home/studio about a year ago and have started offering underwater portraits to their clientele. Kash and Sherry own Classical Photography in Carrollton, Georgia.

Kash has been refining the process this summer and now has a pretty good handle on the technology. He’s using natural light in these shots and has enhanced it by covering the bottom of the pool with Mylar (just like the silver and gold balloons) to help reflect the light. Check out some of these images from their first session. Kash mentioned that he has some new shots to post from more recent sessions; so check back in in a week or so to see how the underwater technique is evolving.

Please note that PhotoOne will be closing at 2:00 pm EDT on Friday and will be closed on Labor Day. If you have an emergency situation, with your studio management software, please call and we will get back to you in a timely fashion. All other technical support, customer relationship and sales requests will be responded to on Tuesday when we reopen at 9:00 EDT. Enjoy your weekend and I hope you get some great weather, a little BBQ and a couple of laughs before the kids start back to school – for real!