I’ve been doing a lot of research into marketing recently and it’s really a fascinating and very deep topic. Much more so than I had previously thought. In fact, I’m slowly changing my whole mindset on marketing and considering it now as a science rather than an art. [Ed. There is an argument here that the marketing people actually want this perception so have gone out to create it, but I’m not going there in this post :o) ]
What my research has done though is to get me thinking more about about the overall impact of my sites rather then their look. Everyone I’ve spoken to so far has said something along the lines of “Wow, that is really cool”. Therein lies the problem: having a cool site isn’t necessarily going to get me clients. Much of my research has shown that having a clean, lightweight interface has a bigger impact on a client than one that is very graphics-heavy.
Problem 1: For a portraiture site, I need to show my portfolio but need to keep the graphics down.
Actually, this isn’t as unachievable as it sounds. I’ve made a few tweaks and prototyped some changes that have made a difference already and are ow on-line. I’m also planning a clean up of the home page to simplify the content, remove the clutter and change the text content too by adding some eye-catching offers. I’m not intending to remove or replace the gallery component at the top of the home page. I want to keep some of the coolness and Wow factor that this component provides and it is a great way to showcase a selection of portfolio images. I am going to make some changes to it though – I don’t like the square images so I’ll be changing these to rectangular instead and just show portrait (vertical) images. In hindsight this fits in better with the overall theme of the site. It’s a portrait site, so it seems pertinent to display pertrait images in the gallery. I’m also going to tweak the PHP code behind this component to show a random image when the page loads.
