Phillip Crous is a Cape Town based photographer with exceptional skill. His request was for a photoblog that showcased his photographs with not much need for textual content. With only a logo and colour scheme to go on I did all the design and layout myself (along with some helpful ideas from my fiancée) with some later input from Phillip to make a few changes.
To reach Phillip’s goals for the site I used WordPress (definitely my CMS of choice) and employed the Exposure theme by WooThemes. I chose this theme because it has fantastic support for multiple galleries and is easy for the client to manage. I did a lot of customisation of the theme though and as a result it looks and works strikingly differently to the basic functionality. I submitted this website to the WooThemes Showcase and as of 14 November 2011 it is featured there. Check it out here.
For the home page slider I used SlideDeck (Pro version) as I find it to be hugely flexible and surprisingly simple to customise and implement. I made a few CSS modifications to the default view it gives, but on the whole I used just what the plugin gave me and it worked smoothly right out of the box.
Because I could handle the design however I wanted, I had a lot of fun building this site and making it look good. My fiancée gave some valuable UI input as well that helped me get the site looking just right for Phillip.
As far as the content on the site goes, that is all in Phillip’s hands – I gave him a brief lesson in how to use the WordPress back-end and he seemed to pick it up easily. Along with this was the decision to break up the content into categories and use those for the main navigation. For the type of photoblog that this is, that decision makes complete sense as it throws the user straight into the photos with no need for unnecessary preamble.
Details:
- URL: http://www.phillipcrousphotography.co.za
- Platform/Framework: WordPress using Exposure by WooThemes
- Javascript library: jQuery
- Features: All content managed entirely by client | Home page image slider | Customisable galleries
I like the look, good work
What about SEO? Sure few words make a site nicer to look at but maybe you should add a hidden text layer?
I told the client about the problems with such a small amount of text, but he was adamant that he wants it like it is. He can always add text to any of his posts, so it’s up to him really, but his focus is on the photos.
I could do the hidden text thing, but I always feel like that’s cheating the system a bit.
Cheating, I don’t think so, it’s just adapting to fill a gap in search engines. Pixel searching isn’t something that is simple enough yet and a picture is worth a thousand words anyways
Fair enough – maybe I’ll look into that. Will have to chat to the client about it all first though.
I would recommend that you tread carefully when dealing with hidden text. You can wind up doing more harm than good.
This post is a little old, but still pretty comprehensive: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/guide-to-hidden-text
There are lots of other resources out there on this issue too if you Google around a bit. Nice design by the way!
Thanks for the advice – will have a look at that post!