A New Design

It's been quite a while since I did anything with the website and I had so much new to showcase. So a few weeks ago I decided to redesign the site with new information and new images.

I played around with the redesign a while back but got distracted with other projects before it was completed. Thankfully I still had that effort saved on the hard drive which kept me from completely starting over.

My wife Cathy helped me with the copy and design of the site which had it's moments of creative frustration. I valued her input and help not only as a bride but also as a former copy editor. In the end some of the decision were mine.

The biggest thing for me was to not only freshen up the look of the site with recent weddings but to also add some of my personality to it. I did a lot of research by looking at other wedding photographers' sites to see how they worked in their personality to their site.

Another big thing for me in redesigning my site was to make it look different than the other wedding photographers'. If you are a bride you've probably looked at dozens of wedding photographer websites. To me they all looked the same. By that I mean they are all flash-based and have the same dreamy wedding music blaring at the start of the viewing experience.

I wanted my site to be html based so that anyone could view the site no matter if they were on their PC at home, iPhone while waiting at a light or showing their parents on their dial-up AOL account. I was told once by another photographer that their reason for not having a super fancy flash site was because the person paying the bill may be of an older generation and may not have the latest and greatest computer. Wouldn't want to inhibit the paying party's viewing experience.

The other aspect of music on my site is a personal one. I have a feeling that many brides do a lot of their wedding day planning at work. The last thing they need is being busted by coworkers because a vendor had loud wedding music on their website. As a colleague said to me, "Pretty music isn't going to make your pictures better." So true.

I have to say that I'm very happy with the way the new site looks. It's easy to navigate. Has some nice design elements and the pictures load very quickly which is key when I bride typically makes an initial decision on whether to consider a wedding photographer within the first 30 seconds of being on their site. If she has to wait for images to appear or has to click through them one at a time she won't be happy.

The bio piece was the tough part for me. Normally photographer bio pages go something like, "My passion is taking pictures. I feel fortunate to have made this my calling... blah blah blah." It better be your passion or you're in the wrong business bud. I found some bio pages that were more insightful like, "If it weren't for Starbucks caramel machiato I couldn't exist." Those are the bits of a person's personality that I wanted to see.

So I decided to write my bio like a series of tweets. My thinking was that my target audience of women in their mid-20s are used to reading things like Twitter and could get a sense of me this way. Cathy and some others didn't like it but they were also outside this target demo. Again I didn't want some drivel. I wanted personality and thought this hit it head on.

Redesigns are always tough. It's kind of like what Janet Jackson says, "What have you done for me lately?" It forces you to look at your work and review whether or not you've pushed yourself. They are also time consuming. And most importantly they are greatly needed in order to move your business forward.