Once upon a time, it was only necessary to have a website. Then blogs became important. Now you need to think about social media with tools like Twitter and Facebook. If your business has a second or third off-shoot with its own site and own blog, you could easily have 4 or more places to login and update. Add to that an order fulfillment service or album design company, or payment gateway and all the social media sites… That’s too much.
You should no longer consider these things as separate entities but should consider them different pieces of a web presence. Think of your main website as your hub. The more we can consolidate your web presence, the better your site will work for you, and the easier your life will be.
The inspiration for our design with all of our Photography Blogsites themes came from the last four years of working exclusively with photographers, both branding and creating their custom sites. We started with a strategy: make the lives of our clients easier, increase their findability (SEO) and give the power to manage your own online brand.
OUR GOALS
There a few things that we aimed to accomplish for our All-in-One BlogSites:
- They must be easy to use.
- They must look and feel like a portfolio website, with your best work displayed right up front. Defining your brand.
- They need to handle any type of content – video, photos, text, music, etc.
- They need to display photos as large as possible, yet give many different ways to display.
- They must be an all-in-one portfolio site with a built-in blog.
- They must have great search engine visibility.
- They should allow visitors to connect: ability to leave comments, accessible links to social networks and other sites, feeds from Twitter and your blog, etc.
- They should publish an RSS feed, which allows people to subscribe, can push content to directories and aggregators (great for building links), can push links to Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Some technical considerations:
- No Flash allowed. (Flash hides content from search engines)
- Incredible SEO.
- Must be HTML and CSS based.
- Crawlable by search engines.
- Visible to iPhone, mobile devices and iPad users.
- Includes a Content Management System (CMS).
- Allows a user to update content.
- No need to know anything about HTML code.
- No need to call a web designer every time something needs updating. (Go ahead, fire your webmaster.)
Photography BlogSites is all of those things.