David Ralph
Bespoke photography website design and development using WordPress
The Client
David Ralph is an esteemed commercial beauty and fashion photographer with a portfolio that includes top-tier clients like Christian Louboutin and Liberty.
The Challenge
David found his current Cargo website difficult to use, with templates that were hard to customise to achieve his desired style and layout. He sought recommendations on how to enhance his online brand and identify the best platform for his photography portfolio. A key requirement was a platform that made adding new projects simple and straightforward, without anything over complicated.
The Solution
I collaborated with David to design and develop a custom WordPress photography portfolio. We decided to transition from Cargo to a bespoke WordPress site, allowing David to update and edit his content with ease, even with minimal technical knowledge.
Together, we researched websites and styles that resonated with David’s aesthetic, ultimately creating a clean, minimal design featuring simple slide-down navigation and clear project categorisation.
Adding a project in WordPress became a breeze with drag-and-drop photo reordering and custom page-building tools, making layout and grid creation easy and automated.
We encountered an early visual challenge: David wanted each photo to be viewed in its entirety without any scrolling. To address this, I developed a custom solution where the site automatically detects whether an image is landscape or portrait. It then organises the images so that two portrait images are displayed side-by-side at the same size as a landscape image, ensuring no images become too large to view.
Site speed was crucial due to the heavy image load times, but the final site is lightweight and super fast, providing an optimal viewing experience for David’s stunning photography.
Working with Sofi was a pleasure, I’m quite scared of all things website related but Sofi made the whole experience very easy going from the start. I gave her bit of a jumbled brief even by my standards and she came back with some lovely, clean and simple ideas which have completely transformed my site. She also never complains when she gets the odd email from me for a bit of site update hand holding which in itself is a life saver. I couldn’t recommend her highly enough
David Ralph
