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Re-developing your website so it works for you

April 16, 2007, 03:14:22 PM

Yes that’s right coming soon we will be re-developing one of our members websites and guess what? You can watch as we go though the stages. Travis Minnigs has kindly let us use his website to work on for such things as re-development, search engine optimisation and getting a website to do exactly what you want it to do. So if your site could do with a spring clean make sure you check back to what will be something your website can’t live without!

Cheers and Beers

Stew

« Last Edit: April 19, 2007, 06:32:10 AM by Stewart Plant »

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Stewart Plant

Website
www.stewart-plant-photography.co.uk
Blog
http://stewart-plant-photography.blogspot.com/

Jacque Dufrene

Reply #1 - April 17, 2007, 11:48:39 AM

I for one, will be waiting for this eagerly...

Need to totally rework mine, especially for SEO.

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www.jacquedufrene.com

Stewart Plant

Reply #2 - April 17, 2007, 04:19:42 PM

Well Jacque this is the place for you, SEO is going to be one of the biggest parts of this. for the last ten years I have seen the internet grow and grow with many fables for how to get your site Number 1 on this that and t'other website. Well once and for all we will be showing you how and whats more for free!! I will be having a word with Ryan and Ed F and seeing if we can make this board members only read, hey why should people who cant even be bothered to register be able to save a fortune and place themselves above the competition!!

So to all you non-members sign up now for FREE thats right what you will be reading here over the coming weeks will save you hundreds of dollars so remember that PAF is the place to be!

Cheers and Beers

Stew

« Last Edit: April 18, 2007, 04:47:50 PM by Stewart Plant »

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Stewart Plant

Website
www.stewart-plant-photography.co.uk
Blog
http://stewart-plant-photography.blogspot.com/

jgoldsney

Reply #3 - April 18, 2007, 11:17:35 AM

Well I can't wait for this to begin...I am in the midst of developing my site and I know that I will be able to gather a ton of info from this.

Joel

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Stewart Plant

Reply #4 - April 19, 2007, 06:34:56 AM

Well now we are behind "Closed doors" we can start with this project.

These are the plans for Travis website

1. Produce a Website that has the looks and feels that Travis wants
2. Make the website search engine friendly to achieve a good placing for web searches
3. Publish the website and generate traffic

So we will go into the first part next Planning your website

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Stewart Plant

Website
www.stewart-plant-photography.co.uk
Blog
http://stewart-plant-photography.blogspot.com/

Stewart Plant

Reply #5 - April 19, 2007, 06:43:18 AM

Planning your website

Ok so hope you are all ready for this. Please remember this is now a members only area and the content is for PAF members only for educational use.

So where do you start with a website?

This in itself is the most important part of a website, people who know how to produce a website can often rush in and get left with disappointing results, the reason for this is you need a good plan to transfer your idea to your website.

Ask yourselves the following questions

What pages do I want for the website?
How do I want the website to work?
What theme do I want for the website?
How will you navigate around the website?
What additional features do I want to include?

Once you have this information you can proceed with start to plan the website on paper, yes thast right paper! Ok if you are good with drawing on a computer please do it this way but at the end of the day you need to apply ink to paper in one form or another to make a hard copy of your design. This is what we will be doing with the information that Travis has supplied to me. If you are going to follow this and wish to comment on anything I am creating a post seperate from this thread for people to reply to so that we can keep all the information in an easy to print format.

So our next lesson will be on designing your proof website and navigation tree.

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Stewart Plant

Website
www.stewart-plant-photography.co.uk
Blog
http://stewart-plant-photography.blogspot.com/

Stewart Plant

Reply #6 - April 25, 2007, 04:23:36 PM

OK so now I'm back sorry to all had the worlds supply of work on for past couple of days but got a free moment now to continue.

So we left it with asking the questions you need for your website. Travis wants the following things in his website

What Pages does he want?

Home
About Travis
Galleries
Contact Travis
Friends(Links Page)

As you can see this is a simple layout and one that is easy for the customer to work from.

How does he want the website to work?

Well Travis wants his web page to be center weighted with a header at the top that features his links in both image and text format as well as his signiture block and the company logo. As we have said navigation will be via either image or text link so just HTML and Java linking, remember most search engines robots wont follow a Java script link and so you need the html to direct them to the rest of your pages. The theme will work on the colours of Travis site at the moment so that it fits in wioth the corporate branding for his business.

We should at this stage look at what will be updated on the website as we go along over the design period, the 6 month period and the yearly review. What images and content will you be changing, obviously the galleries will be changing so we have to work on an easy way to change them this needs to be worked into the plan now as we want to showcase Travis best work when we update. We also want Travis to be able to upload his images for easy upgrade.

so here we are with an idea for the website, where do we go next on planning? Well its time for ink to hit page, i will next post the breakdown of the website with table layout and navigation tree so we can see what we are looking at.

so until then start thing how you would assemble your website on paper

Stew

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Stewart Plant

Website
www.stewart-plant-photography.co.uk
Blog
http://stewart-plant-photography.blogspot.com/

Stewart Plant

Reply #7 - May 01, 2007, 04:04:31 PM

Ok so here is the layout, this is where we go over to travis to have a look and see if he agrees with the first part of the design

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Stewart Plant

Website
www.stewart-plant-photography.co.uk
Blog
http://stewart-plant-photography.blogspot.com/

Travis Minnig

Reply #8 - May 03, 2007, 04:42:24 PM

First, let me say 'Thank you' to Stewart for putting in his time and sharing his expertise to help me with my website. Honestly, we all know mine needs some help, and when he offered to give it to me, I was ecstatic. I am very glad that he is doing it on this forum so everyone can hopefully learn something from it, and I am grateful that I get to participate so closely. So... A big round of applause for Stewart Plant! (Pretend there is some clapping smilies here).

All right, so this is the 3rd time I've had to type this reply, so sorry if it comes across a little harsh.

I'm not sure about the neutral background. I would rather have the company colors across the entire page regardless of screen size/format.

I only see three columns for the "Links", does this mean there is only three? There are four in the flow chart.

I don't want viewers to have to click more than once to get anywhere on the site, but especially to the galleries (services.htm).

Is it possible to have a drop down menu from the mouse hovering over the link that would allow a single click to the galleries?

This idea could also be applied to the about.htm link with Pricing, Bio, and Contact.

Travis

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Travis Minnig Studios

Stewart Plant

Reply #9 - May 04, 2007, 06:35:29 AM

Thanks Travis for getting back and wonderful to have some questions with regards to the website, the more you have the more people can learn, let me go over these questions with the answers so that we can see reasons and ways around.

I'm not sure about the neutral background. I would rather have the company colors across the entire page regardless of screen size/format.

Why do certain websites have a neutral colour on them? Why does photoshop have a neutral grey behind the photograph? The reason is colour perception. Your eye makes adjustments to the colour that it see's in domination behind an image so if you look at a dark blue colour lots you will have photos that look light and yellow as you adjust for it. By using a neutral colour you reset the eye to its normal perception so that your images look correct when viewed. This is why I always recomend you have a neutral colour on a website with photos on it so that you wont be affecting your customers view of your images.

I only see three columns for the "Links", does this mean there is only three? There are four in the flow chart.

Yes there will be as many top linking areas as needed for the website, the first diagram is only to get the design concept to you, once it is finalised we will then go to a jpeg layout proof with all the information in it.

I don't want viewers to have to click more than once to get anywhere on the site, but especially to the galleries (services.htm).

A rule of thumb for all websites is that you should be able to navigate to any area within three clicks from the index page, we will work into this a menu system to access the services from the menu

Is it possible to have a drop down menu from the mouse hovering over the link that would allow a single click to the galleries?

Drop down menu's are great ideas but here is the first lesson in website, robots when they trawl your site will not follow javascript links such as you have in a dropdown menu. They need to have a html link code to follow and as of this should we have a drop down menu we will repeat the links on the base of the page so that any robot can find the information that will be on these pages.

So for the next step I will ask Travis to have a look at these answers and then let us know which way we want to go forward with the next step which is producing how we want the front page to look which I will design first of in photoshop.

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Stewart Plant

Website
www.stewart-plant-photography.co.uk
Blog
http://stewart-plant-photography.blogspot.com/

Travis Minnig

Reply #10 - May 04, 2007, 12:57:32 PM

OK, Thanks for the comprehensive answers to my questions. I will try the grey background and see how it looks to me. I understand about the comparison of colors and appreciate the explanation. I have also heard the rule of 3 clicks; I just want mine easier to navigate than that. Would it be OK to try and do something like Ryan has suggested with the hidden menu items that show on mouse over? Also, I really like the idea of a sitemap, so I was excited to hear that it will be part of this training. As I looked at this, I knew there was something missing, and I finally figured it out; it is a login page for clients to view their images. Also, as for the links.htm, Theo had mentioned that it was not professional. I would like more people's opinions on this because a vital part of my marketing plan includes needing this place for my networking with other businesses, that are in turn going to promote my photography. The only other question I have is: Will there be a link that will return a viewer to the home page? I personally hate webpages that don't have this, so I am concerned that mine does. Here is another flow chart on how I would like the navigation bar to work:

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