David Ralph

The Client

David Ralph is an established commercial beauty and fashion photographer working with clients such as Christian Louboutin and Liberty.

The Challenge

David found his current Cargo website difficult to use and the templates hard to customise to get the style and layout he desired. He was looking for recommendations on how to improve his brand online and the best platform to use for a photography portfolio. A crucial requirement was that it was really easy to add a project as David didn’t want anything over complicated.

The Solution

I worked with David to deliver both the design and development of a custom WordPress photography portfolio.

We decided to move away from Cargo to his own bespoke WordPress website that he could update and edit with little technical knowledge.

We worked together to research sites and styles that David liked to create a clean, minimal design with simple slide down navigation and project categorisation.

Adding a project in WordPress is quick and easy using drag and drop photo reordering and custom page building tools mean creating layouts and grids is easy and automated.

We discovered a visual problem early on which was that David wanted a photo to be seen as a whole without any scrolling, so I developed a custom solution. When David uploads a collection of images to the project gallery the site decides if each image is landscape or portrait and organises the images so that portrait images sit two in a row at the same size as an equivalent landscape shot, preventing them from becoming too large to view.

The site speed was crucial due to heavy image load times but the site is lightweight, and super fast.

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