Main Brief Points:
- Create a new logo
- Design a new, easily navigable layout
- Keep existing Google rank as best as possible
- Recreate all existing wedding location reviews to his “wedding location critique” section in a new more professional format
- Allow my client to easily add/edit new wedding location reviews to his “wedding location critique” section
- Allow my client to easily add/edit items in his portfolio
- Automatically display portfolio and wedding location galleries in a professional gallery system with fast loading times
- Create a blog for any news and updates
- Make my clients customer testimonials more prominent
- Keep all static content editable by my client
The original style of Paul’s website did not do his work justice. After looking through his extensive amount of high quality shots I sat down and began to sketch up a project brief.
First things first, how will it work?
Paul’s original website featured a portfolio like any photography website but an interesting feature was a page dedicated to each photo shoot location. These “location pages” had info on the location, indoor and outdoor ratings in regards to the quality of photography that the location allowed and of course photos… the problem though was that all of these photos were just plonked on the page which meant scrolling down to see each one individually which was a huge problem seeing as some location pages had around 30 photos.
The solution to this was to create a nice, clean image slider for each location page and of course for the main portfolio page where Paul showcased his best shots. The location information was now placed next to the image slider allowing both the vital information and the photography to be seen above the fold so to speak.
Each location page was built in a way that made it incredibly easy for Paul to add his images to these location pages. After creating a new location, the images are simply uploaded all at once with one click and then the website does the rest… all photos are then re-sized and automatically placed in a sliding gallery on the corresponding page… even the alt tags and image titles are entered automatically for Search Engine Optimization purposes.
As per the initial project requirements I kept everything as simple as possible making the website as easy as possible to navigate. Customer testimonials would be displayed one at a time in random order on the home page and a selection of Pauls favorite photos would now now fade in and out on the home page so that his work would be the first thing people see when visiting.
The design of the header, footer and background of the website were kept very minimal. The background is plain white except for a nice, large and bold watermark of Paul’s new logo which I also designed at the start of the project.
A blog was created so that Paul could write his own case studies and share any news or info with his target audience.
So all in all my client walked away with a complete package. His work is very easily added, it is very easily viewable by anyone visiting and now he has a site that does his work justice. As my client was very organized and knew exactly what he wanted, the project was completed in a very quick seven days from the design sign off.
If you are interested in a website such as this feel free to drop me a line here.
View the finished website here.
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