Chris Sommers is one of our member photographers based in Israel, and recently she came to us for a web template customization. Primarily a reportage and portraiture photographer her work gives an inside look at cultures around the world from Mexico to China and back.
Chris liked the site she currently had but realized it had a few limitations. One of the limitations of her old site was that it wasn’t responsive. That means the website was not designed for all screen sizes. Today more and more people are viewing websites on mobile devices and it’s important to have a website that works across all kinds of devices. Here are a few shots of her old site.
This is one of the reasons we chose to go with a Squarespace site. Their sites look nicer on mobile devices and are so easy to keep up to date. One thing that Christine liked that she wanted to bring into her new site was the horizontal scroll function. For this reason we chose to go with the Ishimoto template. This template had the most similar functionality to her old site while still maintaining the responsive element. So once we selected a template we dove right into the customization.
Chris’s work is beautiful so I wanted to give the template a classic and clean look so that her work would stand out. So with that in mind I picked a grey color scheme for the typography on her site and selected a font that was clean and modern to use throughout. For her navigation, due to the number of galleries she had, I choose to have a gallery selection that had a sub-navigation drop down menu. This kept her primary navigation clean and simple without looking too bogged down with gallery names. Here are a few shots of the here new site.
As I mentioned previously we chose to go with Squarespace because of how great their templates look on mobile devices. Here is a shot of one of her galleries on a mobile device.
Something we also did in the customization was adding more hierarchy on her contact page. What this means is we took the information that was pre-existing and restyled it. This gives the viewer a better idea of what items of information were the most important. A good hierarchy is something you always want on your contact page so it’s easy to see what is the best way to reach out and work with you. Here is a shot of her new contact page.
Chris had also requested that we integrate a blog into her new site. Due to the super easy functionality of Squarespace it was as easy as a click of a button. Here is a shot of her new blog:
See more of Chris’ work on her website!