Beyond the portfolio: prices, travel, terms and delivery as text

Packages and prices, with what moves them

Give every genre you sell a starting price and name what raises it. A page that says "contact me for pricing" answers nothing, for a couple or for an assistant asked what you charge; a starting price with its conditions is a fact both can repeat, which is what makes a page citable. It also saves you the inquiry that ends the moment the number arrives. Each page in this article is an answer page for a question a client would otherwise have to email about.

Two more lines belong on the page. Say whether prices include sales tax or VAT and which currency they are in, since clients may compare photographers across a border. And date the table, "prices for sessions booked from [month year]", because an undated list leaves every reader guessing whether it is current. In the JSON-LD markup, each starting price can be an Offer stating the same figure the table shows.

Keep the table on the page as HTML. In our audit of 9,483 small business websites (40 trades, 90 metros, late August to early September 2026), 2.1% kept their real content, such as the price list or the service menu, in a PDF. The figure covers every trade, and the PDF trap explains why a file behind a link is a poor home for a price.

Open dates, holds and booking

For a wedding, the date comes first: nothing else matters if it is taken. A site can answer without a live calendar. State how far ahead you book, which days and seasons you work, what holds a date (a signed contract and a retainer), and how soon you reply to an inquiry. If you list open dates, show when the list was last updated, and keep it current with each booking.

A booking calendar or inquiry widget drawn by a script serves the visitor, but its contents are not text a fetcher receives. Put the facts in a sentence beside it: "Weddings: now booking [season or year]. Family sessions: [weekdays and Saturday mornings]. Headshots: usually within [days] of your inquiry." For business clients, add the notice you need and whether you work evenings and weekends.

The area you cover, and what travel costs

Name the city you work from and the area you cover without a travel fee, in the words clients use: towns, counties, a distance, a drive time. Then say what happens beyond it: a fee per mile or kilometer, a flat fee by zone, an overnight stay past a stated distance, and how destination work is priced. The same area goes into the structured data as areaServed and onto your map listing and directory profiles, in the same words.

A photographer who works from home need not publish a street address; the city and the area are what a client needs. What matters is that the site, the listings and the markup name the same base and the same area. 34.1% of the sites in the audit had no postal address a machine could parse, an all-trade figure; for a home-based photographer, a stated service area is what stands in its place.

Contract, retainer and cancellation, in plain words

Your contract is the document that governs, and it is for your lawyer to write. The site's job is a plain summary of the terms clients ask about before they sign, with a link to the full terms:

• The retainer: how much it is, as an amount or a share of the total, whether it is refundable, and that it holds the date.
• The payment dates: when the balance is due and how it can be paid.
• Rescheduling: whether the retainer moves to a new date, and with how much notice.
• Cancellation: what is kept or owed at each stage.
• If you cannot attend: whether a named associate covers the booking, or what is refunded.
• Weather, for outdoor sessions: how a new date is set.
• Usage: what the client may do with the photographs (personal use, printing, posting online, or commercial use for a business), and who holds the copyright.
• Raw files: whether you provide them, and what you deliver instead if not.

Write the summary as the answers themselves, not as a promise to explain them on a call, and keep it in step with the contract: when a clause changes, the summary changes with it.

Delivery: what arrives, in what form, and when

Delivery is part of what a client buys, so state it as plainly as the price. For each genre, say whether there is a preview and how soon, when the full gallery arrives, roughly how many edited images the coverage produces, how the files come (an online gallery, downloads at full and web size), how long the gallery stays online, and when prints or albums follow. For business work, add formats and sizes, same-day or next-day selects for events, and where the files may be used.

A range is honest where a single number is not: "about [range] edited images for [hours] hours of coverage". Say what happens in your busiest months if delivery takes longer then. And word the delivery time the same way on each genre page and on the prices page, so the question has one answer wherever it is read.

An About page that says who holds the camera

A client booking a photographer is booking a person, so the About page names them: who photographs the work, who the second shooters or associates are and which packages include them, where you are based, which genres you shoot and for how long, and the languages you work in. If a venue or a planner may ask for proof of liability insurance, say whether you carry it and can send a certificate.

Put these facts in a paragraph near the top, not at the end of a story about how you started. Mark the photographer up as a Person tied to the business, under the same name the page uses, and let the photographers' hub guide the rest of the LocalBusiness schema. Which questions lead clients to each of these pages, and how to collect them, is the subject of the article on client questions. Whether a rewritten page changes what an assistant says is for a reading to show, taken the way our methodology sets out.