When building a site or redesigning your current site, keep these things in mind. It is imperative that the site be useful and easy to navigate both for your visitors and for the search engines that will eventually crawl them. The best way to make sure that search engine spiders cannot find you is to make your site with frames on the home page or make it totally in Flash. Embedded flash in an otherwise html site is fine, as long as the content is readable to spiders… html text.
When building a site or redesigning your current site, keep these things in mind. It is imperative that the site be useful and easy to navigate both for your visitors and for the search engines that will eventually crawl them. The best way to make sure that search engine spiders cannot find you is to make your site with frames on the home page or make it totally in Flash. Embedded flash in an otherwise html site is fine, as long as the content is readable to spiders… html text.
Now, decide what you want your visitors to see and discern from your home page. Are you a quiet guy, or a flamboyant gal… do you do more than take pictures (workshops, teach, design etc…) or is photography your only, totally focused passion? These questions should be discussed with your designer as soon as possible. Do you want to keep your visitors coming back to the site for more images, or do you simply plan to use it as an online adjunct to your current hard-copy marketing?
There are entire books written on these subjects and I feel that there are even more options to look at. Blog style pages are getting very popular. These two or three column sites look more like a blog than a traditional web site, and that is part of their appeal. Fast and sleek, they are becoming the rage among the cutting edge designers. Simple design with few pages and large showcase images are another style that is coming up as well.
I will show you some examples here of sites that work well for their owners and also talk a little about why the design was created that way.
Rolando Gomez (www.rolandogomez.com)
Rolando is a workshop teacher, glamour photographer and owner of the site GarageGlamour.com. He needed the site to feature his work, his sponsors and his busy workshop schedule. The site has a calendar of workshops, portfolios of image, overviews of his workshops and extensive content on glamour photography. Rolando controls all of the content on his pages with his browser and the totalcontrol backend. Notice the content on the home page and how the page presents Rolando as a photographer / teacher.
Ron Chilston (www.arizonaweddingphotographer.com)
Ron needs a site that he can do extensive search engine optimizing on. Ron is always tweaking his copy to help him get found and to keep the visitor interested. His easily navigated site features news, specials, portfolios and contact information. Ron works on his site constantly to refine and make the site more friendly and show the images that keep him booked.
Ron Garnica (www.rongarnica.com)
Ron is a photo stylist. He is very meticulous about most everything he does. His site is small, boutique-ish in presentation and has a delicate, art feel to it. Ron is constantly updating his portfolio with images from recent shoots.
David Doubilet (www.daviddoubilet.com)
World traveler and respected underwater shooter David Doubilet wanted a site that featured his images and a place to keep clients and editors up to date on the places he has shot and will be shooting. The site features stock images, prints for sale, schedules, recent articles written about David and complete contact information. The site can be easily and quickly updated by David and his staff from any browser. This keeps the site fresh and relevant to what David is doing.
John Trotto (www.johntrotto.com)
John wanted a site with very little copy. Just an about page, a contact page and his images. The home page and all other pages are the same size with no page scrolling. This delicate design style works well for Johns images and style.
Larger image displays are becoming more popular as bandwidth becomes less and less of an issue. Our new WebFolio product is proving popular with photographers who want to show images and very little else. The huge size of the images (from 750 pixels wide to 900 pixels wide) show dramatically on desktops in clients offices. These sites feature little copy (enough to work for search engines) and lots of images that are controlled by the photographer.
A photographer that is doing a little of all of this is Mark Culbertson. His site (www.markaculbertson.com) features art for sale, stock for licensing, portfolios of work, news and content plenty for search engines. The site fits comfortably in a browser window and needs little scrolling (excepting the shopping cart and stock work). The site seems almost ‘Flash’ like but is done with html and CSS.
Another shooter that has been doing a lot of business online is Jerry Jacka (www.jerryjacka.com). Jerry's award winning images and stock photos of Arizona have brought him acclaim world wide. He now uses his web site to market and sell the images to clients in every category. His home page has a lot of text, but it fits what Jerry is doing with his marketing and online strategies.
Planning a redesign is more than what the site will look like. It is also planning what the site will say about what you do, and what the site will do for your business.
Tomorrow: Take Stock of Your Stock
Previous:
Flickr… more than just a photoblog.
Show More Pictures (DAP2)
Be Found on the Search Engines. (DAP 1)
No comments:
Post a Comment