Gavin Ashworth Photography
Gavin's website hadn't been updated for years and when his original developer moved onto pastures new he approached me to take on its maintenance, starting with a full site revamp.
Client
Gavin Ashworth
New York-based photographer specialising in capturing images of fine and decorative art and architecture for museums and private collectors.
Project Type
Website
Platform
Theme/Visual Builder
Technologies
HTML | CSS
Key Features
- Professional Portfolio – Designed to showcase Gavin’s photography to potential clients.
- Responsive Design – Working with a WordPress theme to create a fully responsive site suitable for screen sizes from mobile to desktop.
- Image Gallery & Lightbox – Handpicked images from Gavin’s extensive catalogue, categorised and browsable as thumbnail galleries and in a lightbox slideshow.
- Plugin Integration – Harnessing the power of 3rd party WordPress plugins.
- Custom Code – A truly bespoke finish achieved by extending a cutting-edge WordPress theme with customised HTML and CSS.
- HTTPS Security – Reassured visitors and improved SEO with a site secured by SSL and HTTPS.
- Hosting Service – A hosted WordPress solution.
- Aftercare – Comprehensive support, continued site maintenance and future enhancements.
Project Details
Gavin required a portfolio site targeted at potential clients. A place to showcase his images and allow clients to read his profile and gain an insight into his specialised photographic methodology. Gavin also wanted his site to include testimonials, reference a selection of the publications he’s contributed to and name-check some of the prestigious client’s he’d worked with.
Gavin didn’t want to deviate too far from the look and feel of his existing WordPress site, however it was clear that the theme being used was outdated. With limited support for responsive design techniques, pages that looked good on a desktop just weren’t working as expected on tablet or mobile devices. We decided to look for a new theme after weighing up the effort involved in upgrading what was already there, a theme that had been discontinued by its original developer, against the cost of moving to a modern replacement.
The new theme would need to allow me to keep the look and feel Gavin liked while improving the areas that needed attention and future proofing for further enhancements down the line.
Rather than a full redesign, much of the work on this project was about restructuring and reorganising content to ensure potential clients were drawn in and to improve site navigation. This was achieved by cleaning up the header menu, simplifying the portfolio hierarchy, introducing hero sections to the homepage linking to each of the main areas of Gavin’s work, removing redundant content such as an unmaintained blog and adding short descriptions to page headers.
Gavin’s new site was implemented using the Divi Theme. Actually more of a WordPress visual builder than a theme, Divi gave me the flexibility to recreate the original site’s look and feel with the benefits of allowing for fully responsive design.
Gavin’s photographs are his USP and I wanted the new site’s portfolio galleries to present his images in the best possible way. Implementing these, a combination of a thumbnail gallery and lightbox slideshow, presented some interesting challenges.
Divi has a powerful gallery module but it forces its thumbnail view to either portrait or landscape, Gavin’s galleries contain a mixture of image orientations. By default, Divi also restricts all thumbnail images to a fixed aspect ratio – again Gavin’s images are a complete mixture of shapes and sizes. To resolve this I used the default WordPress gallery for the thumbnail view, and a 3rd party plugin for the lightbox slideshow and styled them both with custom CSS.
Client
Gavin Ashworth
New York-based photographer specialising in capturing images of fine and decorative art and architecture for museums and private collectors.
Project Type
New Site
Website
Platform
WordPress
Theme/Visual Builder
Technologies
HTML | CSS