Category: Moore Consulting

Just as the cobbler’s children need new shoes, often a web designer’s own sites get neglected because they’re too busy working on other people’s projects.

So it was with the site for my photography business, Clearing the Vision. I had a new logo and a clearer focus on the sort of work I was doing — mainly children’s photography for parents and organizations. But I needed my new site to reflect these developments.

It wasn’t necessary to tear down the site completely to incorporate these changes, which is one of the benefits of a site driven by a content management system. Modifying templates rolls out a new look across the whole site without have to adjust every page.

As well as a new palette and new logo, I added a homepage slideshow that uses JavaScript not Flash, so it works well on iPads and iPhones. I also stripped the rest of the content down on the homepage to give the images and welcome message more prominence.

My site is integrated with Photoshelter to display both public and private client galleries, so I adjusted the Photoshelter custom templates to keep the same look and feel throughout.

For my portfolio section, I added Photoshelter’s new large-size displays (which also work well on mobile devices). A few tweaks to the blog to add the email newsletter signup box and we were done with the technical part.

As ever, re-writing the text content and choosing the right images to accompany was where the real time was spent. That’s the key material that really repays attention.

Grover Sanschagrin, co-founder of PhotoShelter recently wrote a helpful blog post outlining things photographers should think about when choosing a web designer. He makes some good points, and then very kindly recommends me personally.

I’m one of eight recommendations, and Grover explains

I’ve created a list of designers (many of them are also photographers) who I feel are worthy of consideration. All of these designers are also experienced with PhotoShelter’s advanced customization capabilities, which means they know how to integrate all of PhotoShelter’s tools into a website or blog.

If you’re a photographer looking for a new site, especially if you’d like it to integrate it with PhotoShelter, I’d love to hear from you. And you don’t just have to take my word that I can help — you can ask Grover.

You can read Grover’s full post here.

Having a solid website is a great start, but increasingly a good social media offering can really make the difference with your online presence.

I built the website for the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market several years ago, and have been maintaining it for them ever since, adding new artists as they’re selected for the Market, and keeping the press releases and press cuttings up to date.

But the organization became increasingly aware that they needed to do a better job of communicating what was happening with the Market throughout the year.

Great material, no time

The Santa Fe International Folk Art Market, produces the largest international folk art market in the world, and its success led to Santa Fe’s designation as a UNESCO City of Folk Art. The Market hosts an annual festive, weekend event on Museum Hill in Santa Fe, New Mexico attended by hundreds of hand-picked artists and thousands of visitors.

Selecting the artists, putting on the event and tracking the impact of the money raised by the artists when they returned home produces some amazing stories. But the Market, a non-profit with a small staff, didn’t have the resources and skills to tell those stories effectively online.

So they asked if I could help.

21st Century story-telling

Together we devised a publication schedule for blog posts and Facebook updates that would lead up to the Market in July and beyond. Some of the stories introduced new artists who would be attending for the first time, while others looked at the impact the Market makes on the artists’ communities when the artists return home with the money they’ve made in Santa Fe. We also looked at the role volunteers play in making the Market happen every year.

I then wrote the blog posts, often interviewing people involved, or working from suggestions and notes from the Market staff. As the Market arrived I also photographed artists and shoppers, and kept Facebook and Flickr up to date with shots from this year’s event.

This combination of writing, photography and internet knowledge is a crucial part of contemporary story-telling, but often its overlooked or undervalued. People can see the need to spend money (or commit internal resources) on technical infrastructure or graphic design, but somehow think that good content and images will magically appear without any work or expense.

Inviting contributions from visitors

Another part of a successful social media campaign is to involve your followers as much as possible. To this end, we invited people who had attended the Market to upload their best images to the Market’s Flickr pool, building a beautiful crowd-sourced overview of the event.

The Market currently has nearly 2000 people in its Facebook group, and monitoring and replying to the posts and comments there is another important part of fostering conversation between these committed supporters of the Market.

Conclusion

In the eight months between May and December 2009, four blog posts appeared on the Market site. Once we started working on this for the Market, we published 24 blog posts in the 8 months between January and August this year. We also gained around 1000 Facebook followers in the same period. The feedback from visitors to the site and the Facebook page has been positive, and we’ll be working on another plan for the 2011 Market.

We’ve just launched the new site for the local Santa Fe Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), and we’re very happy with it.

With over 130 Regular, Associate, Emeritus and Allied members, AIA Santa Fe focuses on local design and construction issues, supports New Mexico architecture students, provides continuing education opportunities for its members and circulates news and event information. Its lecture and film series are open to the public to bring diverse groups together to discuss architectural issues.

Updating their previous site meant calling its developer, and the site content had grown a little disorganized over time. So two key aims for the new site were that it could be updated by AIA volunteers and that it was structured to allow for additions.

Given the site’s main audience is architects, it also had to look good.

We developed a clean and spare design that incorporated the AIA colors but also left lots of white space. The most recent items added to the site’s News section appear automatically on the front page of the site, and other sections include sublevel navigation that can grow as more pages are added.

A Member Directory and Search feature make it easy to find the contact details for the chapter members, while integration with Paypal allows members to pay for their monthly lunches via the site.

And because the site is built using the WordPress content management system, all the updates and additions across the site are now performed by AIA volunteers.

Site address: http://www.aiasantafe.org

Shaw Architecture, P.A a long-established architecture firm here in Santa Fe chose Moore Consulting to design and develop their new website, which has just launched.

Steve Shaw was looking for a clean and elegant design that showcased his high-end residential and commercial work, which includes the new ranch headquarters facility at the Flying Diamond Ranch, the Madden-Follingstad residence and the Santa Fe Business Incubator.

We chose a dark background to show the photography to best advantage and used an elegant display solution to allow visitors to click through multiple images for a project without having to reload the whole page.

The site is built using WordPress, making it easy to maintain. However, we developed a set of custom templates for the site, allowing for control over every detail, from the homepage slideshow to the unusual sub-level navigation which appears above the main navigation bar, allowing the full width of the page to be used for images and text.

Site address: http://www.shawsf.com

I’m delighted to announce the launch of our latest website — it’s for Jeff Henig, an American travel photographer based in Japan, who specializes in shooting cultural and religious festivals across Asia. You can check it out at www.jeffhenig.com.

The challenge

When Jeff first contacted me, he had a blog in one location, a Flash-based portfolio online somewhere else, and a Photoshelter site for his stock archive. He was doing a good job keeping them all up to date, but each had a different look and feel, and navigating between them was confusing for visitors.

He was looking to integrate all three parts of his web presence under one design and navigation system to present a more polished and professional image, and make things easier for potential stock buyers or photo editors. As he says,

“I wanted to create seamless navigation and a consistent look between my Photoshelter site, my Blog and also explore ideas on a better Portfolio page. I was looking for a web designer who could fix what was wrong with my current site. The navigation wasn’t right and it wasn’t interactive enough for me. When I saw David’s personal web site a light bulb went off. I knew he could help. “

His design brief was wisely to go big with his bold images, and also to include a more involving way of showing his Portfolio than just thumbnails.

He also wanted to be able to update his blog, portfolio and archive as easily as possible.

Another potential issue was that he was in Tokyo, and I was in Santa Fe, New Mexico, so we needed a good plan if we were going to work together.

The solution

The plan we came up with used several elements:

• WordPress for the site homepage, blog and About sections
• Photoshelter for the searchable archive
• Evrium’s Fluid Galleries for the Portfolio section

Each had to be brought together under a single design and consistent navigation, to present the best experience for the user.

We loosely based the design on a Photoshelter theme, but customized it drastically, creating a custom banner (that shows a different image each time a new page loads), changing the background colors and adding a shadow box around the main content area.

We also adjusted the typography size and colors to match his logo.

The WordPress side of the site offers 3 main page templates — a homepage that shows a large main image, some introductory text and the titles of the latest blog entries (updated automatically). The About section features a 2-column design, making it easy for Jeff to add more pages to this section if he needs to, as the sublevel navigation adjusts on the fly.

Jeff wanted the blog’s content area to be as wide as possible, as he would be posting lots of photographs. We designed it so he could include photos up to 870 pixels wide, placing a utility area at the bottom of the page to give access to monthly and category archives.

With a few tweaks to the CSS, the Photoshelter galleries fitted in seamlessly for the Gallery/Stock section. You can browse the collections and galleries, as well as search for particular topics while the layout and navigation is exactly the same as the rest of the site. Unless you were paying attention to the address bar, you’d never know you were actually on the Photoshelter site.

Incorporating Fluid Galleries

Choosing Fluid Galleries for the Portfolio section gave Jeff the flash he was looking for in this section (pun intended), while also making it easy for him to update the galleries.

The system instals on your own server and gives you an admin panel to create and update galleries (and choose some navigation and design options). The galleries themselves are then output to Flash, creating a smooth scrolling look.

The problem is that out of the box, there was no easy to link the portfolio section with the rest of the site. We could pop it up in a new window, but we didn’t like that idea, so I took a look at the code Fluid Galleries produces, and worked out how we could embed a logo and navigation bar above the Flash area to integrate it better into the rest of the site.

Now when you’re done with the Portfolio you can easily get to any other section without having to close windows or go via the homepage. I’ve seen a lot of Fluid Galleries portfolios, but not one that works so cleanly with the rest of the photographer’s site.

Long Distance Relationship?

Oh, and the working with someone in Tokyo bit? No problem. A few Skype calls pinned down the requirements and the plan (although talking to someone in the evening for me while it was lunchtime tomorrow for him took some getting used to).

For sending files and comments and questions back and forth we used the superb Basecamp system. I use it with my local clients too, as it keeps everything project-related in one place, but it’s even more valuable when someone’s across the world.

Result

Jeff’s new site brings all the elements together, makes it easy for him to blog, adjust his portfolio or update his Photoshelter archive. And it’s a custom design that creates the impression he wants across all his web content.

Jeff’s summary of things:

“I was very pleased with the redesign of my web site. The end result was a fresh, clean and professional looking web site. David was very professional and a pleasure to work with. I’d highly recommend him and would use him again for further design tweaks.”

Visit the site: www.jeffhenig.com