Ned Leary 3.0

High Impact Photography

Ned Leary has been perfecting his dramatic photographic style since escaping Corporate America in 2004. He’s known for breathtaking portraits and nature shots framed with wood farmed from the depths of the Cape Fear River near his home in Wilmington, NC.

Ned loves to stay ahead of the game and looks for a fresh take on his site every couple of years. We were approached in mid-2010 to update the site we’d done for him the year before – taking it out of a Flash environment and leveraging the power and ease of the PhotoShelter platform for presenting and selling prints.

Let the photos do the talking

When doing any kind of work for a photographer, the most important thing is to keep the design clean and simple. There’s simply no excuse for letting a layout compete with the work being presented.

We chose a limited color palette that complemented the tones found in Ned’s photos and used the grain from his solid-wood picture frames to add some contrast to the header and footer. Iconography is tasteful and sparse and, unsurprisingly, the photography is featured wherever possible.

WordPress Supercharged

The core site is built off of the WordPress framework and then supercharged by our “Aire” extensions. We used standard custom fields to allow Ned to showcase products hosted on Photoshelter.

It’s standard procedure to go the extra mile in branding client logins, social media integrations and a slew of other bells and whistles. We also like to combine all multiple pages and sidebar views into a single template file using PHP switch statements. This keeps your theme folder neat in larger builds and provides a one-stop file for core updates or changes. We’re just geeks like that. In the end, we provided Ned with the ability to update nearly every section on the site, collect leads and emails, and let fans and customers interact with him.

SlideShowPro Director

We’ve been fans of the SlideShowPro interface for a while, especially in our flash builds. As technology has improved so has its functionality. With the use of their built-in API and some development chops, Director can be an invaluable resource to any build where heavy image management is needed.

Ned is very hands-on, so we wanted him to be able to upload, tag, and rearrange site imagery on the fly. Creating API calls in our WordPress templates, we integrated SSP Director to allow dynamic resizing and on-the-fly photo management. If Ned wants to add or remove a photo from his homepage slideshow, he merely uploads a new or deactivates (not deletes) the photo from director. If he wants to change his profile pic, he can upload & tag the photo “profile” within Director’s interface. Changes are presented on the live site immediately.

Skinning PhotoShelter

Making a website look the way you want is easy – so long as you control the development environment. When using third-party tools, however, it gets a lot tougher. Lucky for us, PhotoShelter makes it relatively easy to toss your design into their system, provided you have a strong knowledge of HTML and CSS. Clearly, we were fine.

We started by creating HTML and CSS templates for the photo galleries based on how we normally do things. We wrote our own code and tried to build the galleries around them. It didn’t take long to realize that, while PhotoShelter was going to do their best to make this easy for us, we wouldn’t be able to just get inside and do whatever we wanted.

We imported our page header and footer from WordPress first, and then set about writing new CSS rules to get control over the code PhotoShelter gives you. Most people stop customizing here, but we’re not most people. Our next step was to completely redo their entire checkout and user management systems with a look to complement the design we’d delivered to Ned. We’d never seen anyone using CSS and JavaScript in this way with their platform, but we were undeterred. A day later, we’d managed to create a seamless experience from our WordPress pages all the way through PhotoShelter checkout.

Elegance redefined

As you can see, the resulting site functioned as one whole. Visitors can’t tell they’ve jumped from one site to the next unless they’re paying careful attention to the address bar. Consistent branding makes Ned’s customers more comfortable with making a purchase from PhotoShelter, knowing the money will reach him and that their prints will be in the mail quickly.

Check out our work at nedleary.com and see for yourself.

Resources

WordPress
SSP Director
Photoshelter
Atom Email Campaigns
Gravity Forms