Lake Effects Web Design

Helping Professional Photographers get online...

As a professional photographer and website designer, I have great insight into the website marketing needs of professional photographers.

Keep it simple.
People are hiring you for your photography skills,
not for flashy gimmicks on your website.

 

No "FLASH" websites

We do not build all-"Flash" websites. Since there is no easy way to make Flash SEO friendly, people started asking for less of it. It has also been touted as a slow, inefficient, resource consuming application. Then Apple made the bold move of restricting Flash in its handheld devices.

All of our websites are custom design, hand-coded, and search-engine friendly, and will be designed to reflect the image you want to convey for your business. We specialize in creating professional photography websites, showing off your photography in a clean, well-designed, fast-loading manner, making the right first impression.

Image Galleries:

Your image galleries are the most important aspect of your website. They must be neat looking, fast-loading, and easy to use. We do not use "FLASH" for our image galleries. A combination of technologies including HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript are used to produce stunning image galleries without the bugs, lag times and limitations of Flash.

Image galleries are to show off your highlighted images as a marketing tool. Not meant to be used as a customer proofing tool. Your site will link to your preferred proofing system (ie. Imagequix, Printroom, Photoreflect, etc)

Quick loading images:

We can handle all aspects of getting your images web-ready without sacrificing quality. There is no need to display your images at high resolution. All it does is make it take longer to load. A high-quality JPEG image has a large file size; a low-quality JPEG has a small size. Somewhere between these extremes lies an optimal file size that looks virtually indistinguishable from the original. People will simply leave your site if it's too slow. When pages take longer than about 10 seconds to load, people lose interest fast and go elsewhere.

Slideshows

You can have slideshows set to music in addition to your standard image galleries - the best of both worlds. Slideshows are a beautiful way to show of your photos set the tone of the presentaion - fast displays for Senior Portraits, and slower romantic displays for Weddings.

It is NOT necessary to have a Flash website to display slideshows on your site. A combination of technologies including HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript are supplanting many of the functional features once only possible with Flash. In photography sites, where the focus is primarily set on the images, slideshow animation alternatives can be easily reproduced with JavaScript.

Search Engine Optimization

The way a site is constructed has a huge effect on the way it is listed by the search engines, and therefore on the number of people who visit it. Using the right techniques can make the difference between being in the top ten, or the top ten thousand. Lake Effects Web Design will construct your site utilizing these search engine "best practices" techniques, including building the metatags, title, keywords, and alt tags.

Content Talks

We include a page of text with each of your image galleries. Search engines can't "see" a site. They can only "read" a site. "Pretty" does not talk to a search engine. What "talks" to a search engine are the words, the content, the material in your site that explains, shares, informs, educates, and babbles. Make sure you have quality word content for a search engine to examine.

Blogs and Social Media Integration

Blogging and Facebook have become an integral part of many photographers' marketing strategies. Blogging is a great way to increase interaction with users through comments and to share your personality and vision with the rest of the world. We can link your site to your Facebook page or Blog. If you do not have a blog, we can assist you in getting one started.

Music Options

We usually don't recommend having music automatically playing in the background when a visitor enters your website. A lot of people are simply annoyed by music blasting through their speakers unexpectedly. After all, they’re visiting a photography site to look at images, not listen to music. Audio files also increase a website’s download time substantially. These factors can have a negative impact on the user experience and drive visitors away.

That being said, there is a time and a place for music on your site. Slideshows set to music can be used to set the tone for the diplayed photos. That way you are letting the visitor decide when the music will be played and not forcing it on them.

Call us (585) 393-4712
For a FREE initial consultation and estimate,
or e-mail info@lake-effects.net.