Westside Skateboard Lessons
The very beginning of my entrepreneurship was through teaching skateboarding, something I am very passionate about! As you can see, I have developed this simple website as a landing page for anyone interested in learning. Being on the West Coast offers the best market for skateboarding as you can do it year-round as opposed to my home in Minnesota.
Photo Stitching (Clone Stamp / Raw Filter / Photography)
Checkout what I do at Bay Street Boards; Photo retouching and clone stamping to combine two images into one with a seamless aesthetic to create a clean display of a surfboard.
I photograph new & used surfboards that come into the shop, typically brought in on consignment from the neighbors or board shapers in the area. With using this crisp white wall background found behind our shop, i have found a method to make them look crisp.
After photographing them i Airdrop them onto my computer and begin editing them.
Once in photoshop i begin rotate and edit them to align with the guides created. Within this process I am also color correcting them using Photoshops Raw Camera editing fuction to touch up on any colors or brightness tweaks they may need.
After making sure the colors are looking similar; its time to start clone stamping / erasing parts of the background so they blend seamlessly.
Once its looking seamless, its time to give it a one last look over to make sure that the colors are looking good for the website. Ensuring that the boards are looking true to size and the most natural look they can get because customers purchasing surfboards love a good photo that can show the condition of the surfboards since we sell used and like new surfboards.
Finally before exiting photoshop we always want to save the images under a “Save For Web” setting so it lightens the load on the webpage loading times
Here are some of the final results:
Advertisement Creation
Here are a few of the images that I have been working with for the past few years. All of them I shot and edited through photoshop to be advertisements for various product categories including; Surfboards, Skateboards, Apparel, and more.
Hero Image Creation
This has to be one of my most favorite style of projects to work on; Image collaging
Scouting and gathering different bits and pieces and then combining them into a masterpiece. For this project I added the rip and tear effect by taking the original images and erasing them to fit the rip and tear desired. Difficult yet i feel it adds a more realistic feel and style to the piece.
They key was capturing the most unique elements of the photos you want to display and then crop them to size.
Draft:
Final:
Recent Projects:
SEO Optimization (Rank Math SEO / Page Speed Insights / Google Analytics)
Rank Math SEO – This was the primary plug-in we used to help us track performance on our webpages. Being a retail store we have a ton of products that we are constantly updating. Rank Math helps adding focus keywords that work with Google Search engines to bump up your rank.
I think a few key things to focus on when using rank math are making sure that the products have optimal descriptions while looking stylistically clean.
Its imperative to make sure that the Meta Descriptions, along with ALT Text are filled out properly for the images of the products to function well with the SEO as well.
Through this process of learning SEO, I also found out how helpful it is to have Keyword Titles at the beginning of your site that detail what your store carries. That is the first bit of information that Google reads and it must be clear about what we carry to ensure that when it is searched in Google that the keywords match.
Google Analytics – Diving into Analytics, the first stop was setting up the Google Pixel and figuring out where online customers were coming from. This was a major help in finding what we needed to improve upon online for the shop.
Used Surfboards are unique to our shop because off the bat surfboards are an expensive piece of equipment. However we carry tons of used/like new surfboards in our shop to support the community without having to go broke purchasing a new one.
With this information we really changed the format of how the surfboards were photographed with references to the first Photo Stitching insert. With this change we were able to display a cleaner depiction of our Surfboards category.
After cleaning the images up quite a bit we consistently had more customers coming in saying “Hey, I saw this board on your website….”. They would come in and have screenshots of certain boards that we had posted.
When the prices were right some people got to it faster than others and we had conversion sales from people using our website as an updated database of our surfboard collection.
People have a need to buy different surfboards because each one is unique and has different functions that work for different body types along with skill level and the location of the waves they are surfing. Avid surfers have multiple boards in their “quiver”.
Another bit of information that was helpful was that most people did an “Organic Search” meaning that they were using Google and typed in something like “Used Surfboards”. Us being local to Santa Monica there are very few shops in the area that carry a wider arrangement of used boards. It funnels people to look through our big collection and then brings them into the store for conversion.
PageSpeedInsights – This online page reader was a significant factor in changing the weight of Plug-Ins , images and media displayed on our website. Upon finding this function on the web we were able to then track the performance of our pages and seeing what was slowing us down.
With having so many quality images of surfboards and products on our site, it was bogging down our online presence. Also the weight of the hero images and videos we had streaming slowed the site pages loading efficiency quite a bit.
With this information came a new understanding of exporting new product images.
We began to Save For Web, which optimized the way images are compressed to display on the internet without bogging webpages down. This significantly dropped the weight of the images, thus speeding up loading times of our pages.
Facebook Meta
Relatively new venture I have been working on for the shop. This has been a crucial part in engaging customers with our social media content. We have a good amount of real life followers on our Instagram that consistently watch our stories and engage with posts.
Recently I started to develop the Tagged Content and Products so that people can view the products we have listed on our website within the Instagram app. Using Facebook Meta we have gotten more eyes on our stock of boards and items when people do not want to exit Instagram
Even with the small numbers we have been raking in over the past two months it is exciting to see that people are using it because of the simplicity. Facebook Business also offers great insights on Visitors Followers / Non-Followers.
With this new update we have been able to seamlessly integrate our current Woocommerce store into Facebook business and it has helped get customers eyes on the boards that we offer. As we have unique one of one pieces coming in frequently, the boards come and go at fair prices so it is helpful to have as much exposure as possible.