She owns her site. No monthly fees. No plugins. No theme to buy.

Carla Jacobson has been a photographer for years. She built a successful senior portrait business in Novi, Michigan, and ran her site on ProPhoto, the WordPress-based builder she has used and known well for a long time.

Then she pivoted. A new niche, product photography, meant a new brand: Coola Creative. And this time, she wanted something different.

She wanted to own it.

Why she wanted a new site

Carla's portrait business runs on ProPhoto and has served her well for years. But Coola Creative was a clean break. New niche, new brand, new direction. And she didn't want it bolted onto the side of an existing site.

“ProPhoto has served me well in the past. I just wanted a new site that was my own, and didn't want to purchase a new template to customize that was meant for weddings or portraits.” — Carla Jacobson

Most photography templates are built for weddings or portraits. Carla's new niche is product work, and she didn't want to spend $150 to $900 on a template. She also didn't want another monthly bill stacked on top of the one she was already paying. She wanted something that was hers, end to end.

None of those costs are unreasonable on their own. They're just always there, every year, for as long as the site exists.

Plugins change, add features and tell you that you need more to keep your site safe, or I forget what I'm actually paying for. Yikes. — Carla Jacobson

Starting fresh, on her terms

When Carla decided to launch Coola Creative as a standalone brand, she had options. She started by building a landing page on her existing portrait site, no menu link, just a URL she could send people to. It worked, but it wasn't really separate.

Coola Creative wasn't going to be tied to her portrait business. It wasn't going to depend on a builder she might want to leave. And after the one-time build, it wasn't going to keep charging her every month for the rest of its life. It’s a site she OWNS.

What it was actually like to build

The site went live fast. Carla had five blog posts up almost immediately. She figured out the Sanity Studio interface on her own, mostly by clicking around.

The learning curve was quick once you knew where to go. I found a lot on my own just by exploring. You can't be afraid to explore, because if it's broken, Connor will fix it. — Carla Jacobson

Image sizing took some figuring out. Hero images, side images, gallery layouts. Normal stuff for a new build. But the page structures were already there, so Carla wasn't designing from scratch. She was making it hers.

And the real-time updates in Sanity's presentation view changed how it felt to make changes. Type a word, see it appear. No publish, refresh, hope.

It updates real time, which is really great. You can see the update on the presentation page when you're typing. It is updating. — Carla Jacobson

The new site is fast

Speed matters for photographers more than most. Brands evaluating photographers click through portfolios quickly. A slow site loses bookings before the work is even seen.

And most photography sites are not fast. ForegroundWeb's review of 100+ of the world's top photographer websites found that on mobile, only 6% scored "fast" in Google's PageSpeed Insights. More than half scored "slow." These are the most well-known photographers in the world, and the majority of their sites are losing visitors before the images even load.

When testing all of these popular photography websites in Google PageSpeed Insights, the results are… well… quite "average," with more than half of them falling into that category. — Alex Vita, ForegroundWeb

Coola Creative wasn't going to be one of those sites.

It's a way faster loading time than my other one. That's the biggest difference. — Carla Jacobson

Beyond speed, the galleries look better. The blog layout reads cleaner. The fonts are coherent across the whole site, not page-by-page guesswork.

The site does the work justice

Carla showed her husband the new site. He squinted at the homepage and asked if the images were stock photos.

He goes, 'So, are these stock images?' — Carla Jacobson

That's the goal. A site that gets out of the way and lets the photography land.

What she'd tell another photographer

I asked Carla at the end of the call what she'd say if a photographer friend asked her about this:

Don't hesitate. You won't regret it. It's a very fast and easy site to customize, and you own it. There's no monthly fees, there's no plugins, and it works just as good as WordPress, if not better. — Carla Jacobson

She added one more thing:

Connor's there to help you. He's a real person. You can ask him questions and he's quick to answer. He’s not an ai bot you go round and round with for answers. He offers real human support with real answers. — Carla Jacobson

What "you own it" actually means

Toward the end of our call, Carla asked the question every photographer should ask: what happens if Connor disappears?

The answer is the whole point: Her site keeps running. The code is hers, hosted on her own account. If something breaks years from now, any web developer can pick it up. The handoff documents are already in the code.

Even if the back-end (Sanity) goes down, I still have a website. — Carla Jacobson

Click here to view Carla’s new website, Coola Creative.

Ready for your own?

If you're a photographer ready for a site that's truly yours, with no monthly platform bill and no plugins to manage, there's a path.

The same platform Carla launched Coola Creative on is available for you for a one-time fee. You own the code.

Click here to set up a demo call or ask any questions you have.