George Ventouris is an experienced photographer. Although as an image catalogue his website used to work fine, the pictures were failing to impress the viewer, as it did not match the content he produces. We decided to redesign the website from scratch in order to accommodate a straightforward slideshow-based website, and help it rank better on search engines as well.
There was clearly a need to minimise the navigational path to the galleries. We tried to keep the visitor’s focus away from secondary elements, and used SEO techniques building a strategy based on the photographic content and its possible categorisation.
Elements which did not werer logically contextual were avoided as much as possible, the colour palette was minimised, and the gallery view was built to display merely the most important elements, hiding the site navigation in a convenient hidden element accessible through a downwards arrow. The view looks comfortably on any screen, on both desktop and tablet sizes.
Moreover the slideshows stopped reloading the page at all. All pictures were made available at the time the page was loading, however they would not be requested from our sever until the appropriate time would come, making the loading time of each page super fast. A smart screen-responsive left/right navigation was introduced to help navigate easily, even on smaller screens. All animations were optimised for modern browsers for smooth rendering.
The photo galleries were tagged into new multiple taxonomies whose vocabularies may indicate the place of the photo session and the session subject (hotel photo sessions, portrait sessions etc.).
The result was also applied on a sibling-category of George’s work, a separate website for Wedding Photography in Santorini and other Greek islands nearby.