When Kyle Berg, principal of Ten18 Photography, contacted me I knew I had an ambitious and exciting project in my hands. During our first call we went over his site objectives and the project had WordPress written all over it. He wanted a fully customizable open source content management system that would allow him to create pages on the fly, including a photo blog section, complete with a back end administration panel, and photo galleries. This was the first time I considered designing a portfolio site for a photographer using WordPress and I found it an exciting challenge. The truth is most photo showcase sites on the web are built with Flash and a lot of people are looking for a different solution that includes search engine optimization. I worked with WordPress extensively in the past and this afforded me the perfect opportunity to tinker some more with the platform. WordPress has evolved into a fully functional CMS that can be repurposed to fit any website specification. It is no longer limited to blogging. I won’t digress on the many advantages of using WordPress, you can read that in a previous post. In the following paragraphs I’ll quickly review the process covering initial strategy, information architecture, and visual concepts.

To begin the design process I needed to gain insight into the client’s business. After a few round of emails and detailed phone conversations with the client I got a clear picture of the business and its target market. The bulk of the business comes from Senior photography but also includes portraits, commercial, and weddings. This provided the starting point for structuring the site, always important in the initial information architecture phase of any web project. Aside from the main portfolio categories the client also wanted to give his photography blog prominence. I considered this a wise move, because the blog would provide powerful SEO benefits from backlinks and posts, even more so in his market replete with tech-savvy teens. Armed with this knowledge I created the backbone for the site which included four gallery sections, four service pages describing each type in detail, a testimonials page, a photo blog section for news, and the ubiquitous about and contact pages.

User interaction is always key when designing for the web. And a significant portion of effective interaction is information relevance. Starting with the main gallery sections I designed the pages so that only the most relevant information would show up and not clutter the space, leading to information overload for the user. For example, the gallery sections display only related posts from the photo blog. So if a person interested in wedding photography is browsing the wedding gallery section he will find posts that are within the wedding topic. The center stage of the site is the gallery section where the photographer showcases his best images in an irregular mosaic style layout, which feels almost like a scrapbook. We decided to omit the traditional single frame slideshow with previous and next buttons, and instead lay out all the images in one page. I found this approach refreshing since the user doesn’t need to click but scroll down to visualize all photos in one continuous flow. Testimonials were also included to convey trust in the service pages. These testimonial snippets are randomly pulled from the testimonials category and refresh on every page reload. For the photo blog section we used a magazine type format to display the posts in two columns. All images used as post thumbnails were cropped in a panoramic format to make it more interesting. As the introduction to the site and company, the homepage had a completely different layout. The first thing the visitor sees when entering the site is an accordion type slider that displays four distinct images inviting the user to each gallery section. Below the fold we display featured posts from the blog to get visitors interested in reading blog articles. By doing this we achieved the initial goals of the site on the most important page: opening the door to the photography work and beckoning visitors to take a look at the studio blog.

As in all portfolio centric sites, the focus is on the work, not the design. For visual style the client chose a minimal and fresh yet urban design, using large typography and supporting iconography. The aesthetic is subtle and not too loud as to detract from the main show, the photography. The green color for the accents came from the original logo, but on the site we decided to place an all white logo to make it even more clean and trendy.

The final result is an attractive portfolio website that provides information in a relevant manner. This not only invites users to see the photos, but compels them to read more about the services and the photography process, kind of like a behind the scenes look at the photography studio. Having a blog is like having an open door policy. Let people enter and see what you do, they might just be interested, stay a while, and build a business relationship. I’ve found that WordPress provides the perfect platform to achieve this because of its versatility in form and function. Kyle Berg at Ten18 Photography can attest to that as he happily blogs away when he’s not shooting photos.