City photography websites used to be cloned websites, all the same throughout the network, We knew that this made things easy for us to build the sites as clones to spread out to form the basis of the network.
One of the problems was that photographers didnt like the design and were not interested because of the design and current content of the sites, forgoing that they would be putting forward the content and images to the websites. The other side of the problem is that the Black background was not popular with the clients either. While we wanted to push the websites out it was also important that clients liked the websites as do the photographers.
The old clone website
While we knew the City photography websites worked in the old format and design, it give us good ground to work with and since then we have developed a few websites designs which will go out to certain areas. For new members wishing to operate an area which doesnt already have a city photography website, they can now select which design is used on that local site.
Our New websites
Available in various colours
This is a simple easy to follow website and now is the new main site and is also in other areas, and is available in different colors such as the london website. as you can see the head image is also localised for london city photography. This design is suitable for most internet speeds.
Simple grey design
The picture of the site is slighty different to the actual website. Click here to view live .. This website is a rich text content website. It allows to engage the viewer with text content. there is scope for further development within the content pages of this website. this site also has an extra pop up gallery slide show. The benefits of this design being slightly bland is that the colour images stand out on the pages.
Not really suitable for low-bandwidth areas.
Colourful Low bandwidth photography website.
This website was designed for areas where the user maybe subject to low bandwidth areas. Many photography websites are designed for high speed internet and this causes problems for users in the coutry side where where internet speeds maybe as slow as dialup. With many on Mobile interent the country side offers G3 networks or satalite connections and we have taken this into account with this design. the design is around 80% smaller than the above website.
The small thumbs provide navagation and there is also a link for a pop up gallery for users that wish to try to see if they have the speed to download the gallery show. With Bristol being a mixed area and highly popular, we used the same design and added more content as can be seen in the bristol boudoir information and packages page.
Images do the talking
This website is designed with more images that text, the site uses a slideshow as a background for all the pages and is presented in high definition. We use server technology to provide this as the service uses java, XML and flash to present the images on a HTML page.
the draw back to this this site is that some people using old computers will not see the full image or page, though the design is made so that the text remains visiable on the screen for all but the lowest quality computers. They are also designed for wide screen application as well but these can be srunk down to meet standard formats like 1080 x764 and up to 1680 x 1080 (super HD)
You can see the difference within the Hereford site and the Oxford website as you can see the sites images are both the same but present them in a different way according to the to the preset values.
While this website is very much part of letting the images do the talking the images may cause issue with the text colours and the images also show and tag prompt which is random. this can be omitted from the website. The main content of the website is overlayed over the images and is designed for minimal information and each of the pages (areas of photography) can and should have the correct photographs for each one. which is simply carried out by us in coding the pages.
Simple site with rotating image banner
This website is usable in most areas, the banner seen on the top of the page changes and also offers links to the page showing the images for a certain subject of photography.
As you can see the site is designed for 3 subject areas portraits, wedding and boudoir photography if you look at the Swindon website you can see that the boudoir photography page has video and the package laid out below changing the main link info that is on the bottom of the home page. The portraits page has just banner type images to show a range of photos for that subject and from the Gloucester website which uses the same site design, but has been adjusted to the photographer members, there is a difference with the content on the pages.
The banners should contain photographer images of the members, if the members do not cover the basic areas of photography other photographer images will be used who cover that area both in photographic and in geographic terms.
We are designing Two more websites templates for the city photography network which we will post up soon.
[...] City photography now has a few websites which will amount to 78 in total as we find photographers. We did use one website design (which wasnt that good) when we launched the sites in around March-July 2009. You can see the site designs on the city photography blog here. [...]
Stunning blogpost, I didn’t thought reading it was going to be so awesome when I klicked at the url!!
[...] can find out more on the city photography website on the blog here var addthis_pub = ''; var addthis_language = 'en';var addthis_options = 'email, favorites, digg, [...]