Bad On Purpose
I posted about getting rejected by the Buffalo Bills.
I was confident, I was respectful about it, and I knew I could do the work — it was a photography job they'd posted, and I went after it. The post got legs. It ran. It went a little viral, LinkedIn-viral anyway. And you know what got people fired up? Not the post. Not the fact that I was respectfully confident I could do the job. What set people off was my website.
So let's talk about my website, because as a creative business owner, I have reasons it looks the way it does. It's bare bones. It's basically words and a couple pictures of my beautiful face. And that is completely on purpose.
Now, before somebody screenshots this and dunks on me: yes, you are reading this on my website. A blog, posted on the website, written by the guy who's about to tell you he doesn't lose sleep over his website. I know. Stick with me — it's less of a contradiction than it looks.
Yeah, It's Bare … On Purpose!
For the website purists out there — the folks who still believe a website is the golden egg that runs a business — hear me out. Websites do things for a business, I'm not pretending they're worthless. But as a creative business owner, there are other avenues to go, even if it means one, two, or three extra clicks for somebody.
My website exists for a few simple jobs. It lets someone get to know me in a short way. It gives them a way to reach out. And it shows them my rates — creative fees, whatever you want to call them, they're my rates. That's the list. That's what I need it to do, and I need it to do exactly that much.
Your Work Lives; Where People Actually Look!
Here's the shift nobody wants to sit with. When social media got the power that websites used to hoard — SEO, search engine optimization, getting indexed — the whole game changed. Instagram, as of July 2025, is now indexed for business and creator accounts. LinkedIn, indexed. Blogs, indexed. Facebook and Twitter, indexed. YouTube, the strongest of them all.
So my portfolio pieces go there. A single piece might run on Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube all at once, and the descriptions carry the keywords that get them searched and found. So ask yourself the honest question: what would 50 photos, 100 photos, and a handful of videos — the ones that already live on my social — actually do sitting on my website? Nothing.
Because here's what I do as a business owner, and it's a habit from my nonprofit days when I was vetting people and businesses to partner with. I'd go to their website, and within two minutes I was clicking over to their Facebook, their Instagram, their YouTube to figure out who they really were. The website was the door. The social was the room where I actually made up my mind.
So why would I pour all my resources, energy, and time into a top-tier website when I could put that same effort into quality YouTube videos, quality Instagram posts, and LinkedIn posts long enough to be blog-worthy — the kind with a couple of real paragraphs people stop and read? That does the same thing a website does, except it does it in the place people already are.
The Only Number I Actually Care About
Websites can be flat-out beautiful and still bring in zero business, because the social feeding them is dead. And yes, some people run gorgeous sites with funnels and systems flooding traffic in, and that is genuinely awesome — good for them. It's just not what I believe in right now. I used to. Then the times started changing.
The one thing I care about, the very last thing on the list and the only thing that actually matters, is the ROI on my digital assets. Return on investment. If I shoot arecruitment video for a police department and it drives a 10% increase in applications, that is the job. If my digital assets put eyes and attention on a high school lacrosse team the way they did this year, that is the job. If I'm not getting that, then my business isn't doing its job, and my assets aren't at the level they need to be.
So no — I'm not overbuilding my website to impress people who were never going to hire me. I'm not adding a page, cutting a paragraph, or stacking on 100 photos and six videos just to look impressive. My work will live where people actually look. Where people actually look is where my work gets indexed. And where my work gets indexed is where the conversation starts.That might be controversial to some. Good. But that's exactly where the conversation starts — and if you want to have it, let's talk!!
