If you’ve been here before, you probably realized things look just a little different than they used to! We are so excited today to be launching our new brand and website! This has been a true labor of love that has pushed us to test our patience and resolve, but now that it’s live, we couldn’t feel more accomplished. It was important to us that we rebrand our photography business to more accurately represent our focus on branding and lifestyle photography as a husband and wife team! (More on what those two things mean to come in another blog for another day!)
Once we decided that a new website was an essential part of rebranding our business, we knew that we needed a well thought out plan. We’re photographers, not web designers, so where would we start? We did some research and put together a plan based on advice we found from some of the pros – advice we are sharing with you today!
Gather Inspiration
When we made our first website, we bought a template, put our photos and text into the placeholders and called it ours! That’s not to say it wasn’t difficult. Bottom line – creating a website isn’t easy! But the problem we identified was that it didn’t truly represent us. Our style. Our personality. Our tastes. In order to avoid making the same mistake, we chose elements for our new site based on our style likes!
The best piece of advice we found when it came to gathering inspiration that matched with our own style was to turn to the printing press! We grabbed magazines that we had lying around the house and broke out the scissors! We had so much fun turning pages until we saw something that caused us to stop. It was like treasure hunting, but without the map – we were creating the map!
We paid attention to things like colors, insets, fonts, heading locations, and overlays and clipped out everything that we liked. Then we spread out all of the clippings and narrowed in on the elements that we loved the most. Having that foundation to build from was some of the best (and most fun) time spent!
Sketch Out Your Ideas
After we had an idea for the major elements we wanted to incorporate into our site, we got busy sketching out our ideas. Rather than start on a computer, we actually took time to draw a framework out. Being able to draw, erase, and adjust our ideas on paper helped us to look at the overall feel of the website in advance and allowed us to maintain an open mind. Starting with a template can often corner your creativity. At least it would have that effect on us. We’d get so trapped in by the design that someone else had already put together that it made it difficult to see anything beyond the existing designs.
This process can take some time to complete. It seems overwhelming at first as you look down at a blank page, but trust us, the hard work is work it! You’ll wrestle through your ideas and feel frustrated with the process, but that’s where greatness is made. It takes heat, pressure, and time to make a diamond after all.
We hope you enjoy the new blog and website, friend!
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