Design Considerations – Why? What? How?

“But why?”

If you have kids, you will relate to that question. “Why?” – they go through a phase where it’s all they say… But it is an important question to ask when you start out to build a website. Why are you building it? The answer will be different for each of us but is likely to have similar themes. For me, I had the following objectives:

• Establish and reinforce a brand for my photography in terms of logo, etc.
• Provide a showcase of my best work  with snazzy portfolios that present a clear photographic style and range;
• Allow me to keep people up to date on my best new work
• Take me beyond flickr, which is great in a number of ways but limiting in others. For example, my flickr account is more of a dumping ground for my photos, so it has all sort of low quality images that are not my best work, just relevant to my friends and family;
• Provide a secure, streamlined way for people to access photos that I take for them;
• Learn more about website design so I could use that knowledge to build a better site for MLW (my lovely wife) – previous attempts to build a website were pretty naff (MS Publisher - ugh!) and I wanted to do it right;
• Do it at little or no cost

For others, you could add considerations like:

• Promoting your photography business in the online space;
• Generating leads;
• Facilitating sales of images

It took me a bit of thinking just to clarify this list. There is no point building a website that is all flashy if you just want somewhere to store all your images. By the same token, flickr is not a good place to send potential clients if you are a professional photographer – it’s ‘horses for courses’.

Once I had my objectives, the next step was to consider what I wanted my website to look like, and what functionality I wanted it to have.

Again, the look and feel took a fair bit of thought. If you spend any time on the web, you’ll agree that website look / feel varies drastically from flashy, slick, sites to downright ugly, rudimentary, broken, clunky sites. You want to be clear before you start what sort of look and feel you want. For me, I wanted my site to:

• Be clean to look at
• Have a sophisticated, polished feel.
• Have a colour scheme that does not clash with any images
• Be easy to navigate, with few menu options
• Have flash portfolio galleries but not too much flash animation
• Be easy to update / manage
• Not ‘date’ too quickly
• Have a consitent look and feel between the blog and the website

To fuel my thinking, I trawled thorugh the websites of many photographers to see what I liked and what worked. I did not want to copy someone else’s site exactly (where’s the creative process inthat?) but I did soon work out what I liked. To give you a visual feel for sites that resonated the most, here are some examples that I really love:

• zack arias
• david jackson
• vincent laforet
• chase jarvis
• blake marvin

There are dozens more but I think you can see the recurring theme – clean, slick, not too over the top with animation, clear simple messages. Strong emotional response for me.

And lastly but not least, comes “functionality” – which is a big word that in IT land means “what does it do and how?” For me the functionality includes a few key points:

• Be fast to load
• Work on all the most common browsers
• Be easy to navigate with no user confusion
• Have embedded flash galleries for each portfolio
• Have links to a wordpress blog
• Have links to an email address for contacting me
• Have a secure archive for proofs of images I have shot for people
• Allow me to gather data through google analytics
• Provide for Search engine optimisation

To be honest, not all of this was clear up front - it has developed as I go forward. But you can see that have some clear ideas beforehand will make the process less time consuming and painful.  It also helped me to make a decision on the next topic, which is “should I buy a site design or build one?”

So stay tuned for the next exciting installment!