I have been having pretty good success booking headshot sessions lately, and I think it’s because I had the price up front on my website. It was a nice little experiment, and I want to build on it by expanding the booking of other types of sessions. I decided I needed to add other packages to the website too. It’s not like I don’t have them. For at least a year I’ve had a spreadsheet listing my standard pricing for different kinds of shoots, licensing terms, prints provided, etc. So, I had to think of reasons I wouldn’t put pricing up there.

Reason 1: I don’t want people to be scared away by the price. This reason is bogus, because if people have to phone or email me about a price, they’ll still be scared away if it’s too high. At least if I put the pricing on my website, then they know right away if it’s too high and won’t bother to contact me. The positive flip-side is that most of the people who will contact me will already know the price, have considered it and found it acceptable, and are at some point of decision-making when they finally do contact me.

Reason 2: I want people to contact me so I can personally talk them into a price. This reason is also bogus. The images should speak for themselves. There is no amount of talking I can do to convince someone to buy something as subjective as a photo session. If they like what they see, then they will book a session. If they don’t like it, they won’t book a session. If they’ve decided they like the images, it will boil down to whether or not they can afford it or find the price acceptable, and I’d like to provide them with enough information to make that decision too.

Reason 3: I’m worried about my pricing being compared to that of other photographers. I’m not. I think my prices are fair, and besides, when it comes to photography, I don’t think the determining factor is price.

Reason 4: I’m too lazy to put everything together online. This is the real reason. It’s a lot of work to adjust the layout of my site to accommodate all of this new information. Then I’d need to do some programming that I don’t really know how to do in order to make the site work how it should work. Then, I’d actually have to write the content.

So, after realizing Reason 4 was the real reason, I got to work. I figured out how to adjust the layout. I figured out the programming part. That was actually quite satisfying. I wrote a PHP function to create the navigation menu each time the page is loaded. The function can detect where the menu is on the page, which will determine whether the sub-menu shows or not. It can also detect if it’s on my www.kevinthom.com site or my portfolio.kevinthom.com site so it can automatically adjust the links in the menu to point to the right place. Finally, it detects which page it’s on so it can underline the correct link in the menu. I’m sure a real programmer could have done it in a much more elegant way, but I’m pretty happy with it.

Then I had to create all the content to fill in the new pages that I created. Everything’s up there now. Let’s see how this little experiment works…