OUR OWN WEBSITE
PHOTOGRAPHY TYPE – WEBSITE DESIGN
PHOTOGRAPHY TYPE – CLIENT PHOTOGRAPHY
PHOTOGRAPHY DESCRIPTION – TRADITIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY
LOCATION – DJM
We started our website refresh design by selecting a WordPress ‘theme’ which is the type of software, or a collection of creative and technical tools, that you plan to build your website with. The ‘theme’ is installed to WordPress and from there you build your pages and every aspect of your website. There are many ‘themes’ available, but we use DIVI which is one of the most powerful and creative tools available to designers like us. This website you are now looking at was built using DIVI. Good website design is about ‘the correct delivery of information’ and DIVI enables us to make that delivery an interesting and intuitive one!
You can view WordPress as an engine that powers your website but needs a ‘theme’ to make the website interesting and comprehensive in its operation. WordPress is a powerful and constantly evolving web/BLOG platform that powers over 38% of worldwide website installations, making it the most extensive platform to work with. However, caution must be observed as WP needs a powerful security and service plan behind it to ensure your data remains safe. Whilst WP makes use of powerful ‘themes’ it also uses many ‘plugins’ to power internal sections like e-commerce, e-mail, database apps, visual tools and much more. WordPress offers the user a cost effective and reliable option for building extremely powerful websites that can accept thousands of ‘plugins’ to help grow your site as your business expands. We can also add a ‘user-management console’ to make managing or updating your website an easy to follow experience.
WordPress is a great platform to work with and whilst it offers a huge range of commercial solutions, it is a vulnerable and easy to ‘hack’ system without the correct level of security and protection. The first and most important area to address is your choice of hosting company. We use ‘SiteGround’ who are recognised as world leaders in WordPress hosting. They provide their own range of chargeable security options that can be managed by us. The second level of security is ensuring we select the correct WP ‘themes’ and ‘plugins’ as poorly developed ‘apps’ can allow Trojans and Hackers to damage your installation. Our third level of protection is selecting a range of security ‘plugins’ that constantly monitor your website and provide live reports to your mobile devices. Once this is in place, you need a secure and sensible offsite backup solution. We use a tried and tested backup ‘plugin’ that offers a range of customisable setting to automatically backup your website at pre-selected times to a separate hosted server solution off site. Last, we take a static copy of each website every week and back this up to our own servers.
Photographing for website applications involves a different set of disciplines to that of normal photography. First you need to be able to visualise how an image will look to people on a website that is viewed on many different monitors with varying calibrations and clarity. Thus, you must ensure your composition is more focused on your subject matter and purveys the message you want your clients to see. Secondly, you need to edit and downsize images for use online so that they download very quickly, whilst maintaining quality, and in line with the guidelines laid down by Google for fast website delivery. You will see from our sister website, www.autophoto.co.uk, that we have been providing pro photographic services for over thirty years and especially for website applications.
Design is so often used in place of common sense! For us design is an aid to get your corporate message over whilst engaging the user. However, modern day design must take into consideration responsive ‘UI’ for website, online and social apps. Graphics must be created to work with the online guidelines for fully responsive web design. Responsive design is where your website recalibrates itself to fit into your mobile device’s screens yet retain clarity and legibility. We create all our own graphics using the latest Adobe software. Our design ethos is that every aspect of your website must be echoed throughout your POS and marketing materials creating a strong brand and the feel of a well-managed business. Thus, careful planning must be applied when designing graphics, logos and POS. Finally, design must convey a clean and professional impression without being confusing and using technology just for the sake of using technology!
SEO and SEM (search engine marketing) are vital marketing tools in getting you found online. SEM is about the promotion of your website via targeted paid adverts. SEO (search engine optimisation) is about ensuring your site is optimised for attracting your targeted audience. An SEM campaign is about capturing data via landing pages and using social media advertising. We recommend using adverts in targeted online platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Emerging platforms like ‘TikTok’ are also proving beneficial as well. Instagram offers a sensible single point for business promotions backed by your well-structured website. One of the most common mistakes to make about website design is that once you have launched yours, it is going to get loads of hits. NO, this is NOT the case. First, Google wants to see well structured websites that have regular activity via BLOG pages etc with relevant information. Unless this is done, you will NOT be ranked by Google. Indeed, many poorly built websites are eventually ‘blacklisted’ by Google. Unless you are prepared to invest in a website and its subsequent services and promotions, then you are wasting your money in building a static site. As part of our online marketing we can make use of powerful investigatory tools to track your competitor’s online success and evaluate their ‘key wording’ etc. In addition, when loading videos to say YouTube, we have tools that tell us the best ‘keywords’ or ‘tags’ to use.
However, we endeavour to adhere to the Google ‘SRG’ guidelines to ensure our websites are found online.
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