Lowen Media: A Custom Platform for a Cornwall Photography Studio

A photographer's working week is mostly not photography. There are enquiries to answer, dates to hold, deposits to chase, galleries to upload, print orders to package and a blog that's meant to bring in search traffic. Most studios glue this together with four or five subscriptions that don't talk to each other.

My sister Amy is a wedding, elopement and family photographer in Penzance, Cornwall, and Lowen Media is the platform I built for her business. It's the public website, the booking system, the client gallery shop and the studio back office, all in one place. The first commit went in on 14 March 2026 and it's now sitting at 466 commits, so this felt like a good point to write up what it does and how it's doing in search.

The public site

Most of the page content is editable from the admin. Hero images and page sections live in the database, so Amy can swap a homepage image or rewrite a section without waiting for me to deploy.

Booking and enquiries

The booking page starts with a choice of session type, and each type has its own landing page, which also gives search engines a focused page to index for each service.

From there a booking wizard walks the client through package, date and details, then hands off to Stripe Checkout. Weddings take a deposit and everything else is paid upfront. Availability is checked against Amy's calendar before the client can pick a slot, and promo codes work at checkout.

Not everyone is ready to pay on the first visit, so there's a general enquiry form too, with layered spam filtering. Anything flagged as spam is kept rather than deleted, so a genuine enquiry that gets caught can still be rescued.

The AI chat assistant

Every public page has a chat widget backed by Claude. It answers questions about pricing, session types and wedding packages, and it can act on the conversation: check whether a date is free, show a booking form right in the chat, take the booking, or save someone's details as an enquiry if they're interested but not ready to commit.

When a lead comes in from chat, Amy gets a "warm lead" email and the enquiry lands in the admin pipeline tagged with its source, so she can see which leads came from chat and which came through the form.

I've written about getting context right for LLM features in Context Engineering: The Foundation of Effective LLM Interactions, and the chatbot was a good test of it. Most of the work was keeping its answers tied to Amy's real prices and packages.

Client galleries to upsell

This is the biggest part of the app. After a shoot, the client gets a private, protected gallery. The gallery is a guided experience modelled on in-person sales sessions: the client views the set, picks favourites, and is walked through packages, upgrades, prints and frames before checking out with Stripe.

Favourites sync across devices, so the client can start on their phone and finish on a laptop, and family members can browse and pick their own. Amy controls the commercial side per gallery: how many images are included, which deals and upgrades are on offer, and which print products are available.

Paid downloads are delivered securely through the app with a time-limited window, which Amy can extend from the admin when someone inevitably misses it.

There's also an AR "view on wall" feature that lets a client preview a framed print on their own wall. It's built but switched off for now.

The client portal

Clients get their own portal, activated through an invite email. Inside they can see their bookings, pay an outstanding balance, open their galleries and message Amy directly, with messages updating live on both sides.

The admin side

The admin is where Amy spends her time, so it got as much attention as the public site.

The dashboard shows new enquiries, pending bookings, sessions this week and unpaid balances, with a monthly strip for conversion rate and revenue. Below that is a list of upcoming sessions and the enquiries still waiting on a reply.

Enquiries run as a pipeline board, from new through contacted and quoted to converted or lost. Each card shows where it came from (form, chat or a specific page) and how long it's been waiting.

Bookings work the same way, tracked by both booking status and payment status, with revenue, outstanding balances and deposits totalled at the top. Refunds go back through Stripe from the booking itself.

The rest of the admin covers:

• A calendar with blocked dates and availability rules, synced both ways with Google Calendar.
• A lightweight CRM for clients, with notes, emails and portal invites.
• Gallery management, including scheduled publishing, so a gallery can go live and email the client at a set time.
• Print order exports for packing and shipping.
• Package pricing and testimonials, editable without touching code.
• A log of every email the platform sends.

One internal tool I'd recommend to anyone building for a non-technical client is an annotations layer. Amy can pin a note on any element of any page ("this photo is the wrong crop", "typo here") and it shows up in the admin as a task she can track until it's resolved.

Keeping the server calm

Bulk gallery uploads used to max out the server's CPU. The upload itself wasn't the problem; generating thumbnails for hundreds of high-resolution photos was. Moving some of that work into the browser, then caching and capping the rest, fixed it. Bulk uploads no longer pin the CPU.

SEO and early search results

Every page carries structured data for local business, services, FAQs and breadcrumbs, and the sitemap updates itself as posts go out.

The domain is new, so I wasn't expecting much from search this early. Google Search Console shows the trend going the right way over the last three months (8 July to 5 October 2026):

• Impressions almost doubled (up 95%) from the first month to the second, and the most recent month is still 73% above the first.
• Clicks have grown every month, up 17% and then 29%, so the most recent month is 50% ahead of the first.
• 41% of all clicks in that period came in the last two weeks.

A few local searches already bring the site up on Google's first page, including searches for Amy by name. The more competitive wedding and elopement searches are still a long way off, so that's where the next round of content work goes.

The result I'm most pleased with didn't come from Google at all. When someone asked an AI assistant about family photographers in West Cornwall, it recommended Amy by name and cited Lowen Media as the source. It knew she's based in Penzance, was born and raised there, and does family portraits on beaches like Porthcurno, Sennen, Marazion, Perranuthnoe and Gwithian.

Getting cited by AI assistants is exactly what I wrote about in AI Search in Mid-2026, and it's good to see it happen for a site that's only been live a few months.

Analytics only runs with consent. The most recent change is a UK PECR cookie banner: nothing is tracked until a visitor accepts, and they can change their mind any time.

Like most of what I build now, Lowen Media was built with Claude Code. If you're curious how that workflow looks on a different project, the Marazion Snooker Hall booking system is a good comparison.

You can see the live site at lowenmedia.co.uk, and if you're after a photographer in Cornwall, I know a good one.