We wildlife photographers are a fortunate and often obsessed bunch. We get to spend hours upon hours in the field observing wildlife in its natural habitat which is incredible. And then we get home, many times after dark, and all we want to do is look at what we couldn’t see well enough while chimping. The hope being that we captured that one shot where we pop out of our chairs and do a happy dance cause we nailed it. Not me of course, but I know a guy, who knows a guy.:)) And then we begin posting those images to Facebook, Instagram, 500px, etc. and our own websites. A day in field can easily amount to two days behind the computer.
For those of you who have a personal website or if you are thinking of building one to show off your images to the world you know there are a multitude of options available to you. I coded my first website in HTML and it was ok but I kept seeing other wildlife photographers with these websites that I drooled over. Their images were full screen and popped off the page. And I always thought to myself, don’t my images deserve to be viewed that way after the hours spent shooting and editing.
So I did a little research, found a theme I liked on theme forest, bought it for $79 and stood up a staging server. I was all set to go or so I thought. The advertisement made it sound so simple, so this monkey sat behind the typewriter and got down to it. Remember I know enough HTML coding to be dangerous so this was going to be a breeze.
After countless email exchanges with support just trying to get my home page design to look like the one on their preview page I gave up, it was way too frustrating. I decided to turn my energy towards finding a professional web designer that would be willing work with me on the project to design a website based on my vision. Also not an easy process, after speaking with about five different ones and reading forums and feedback there were reviews on designers who bailed on projects, never returned calls, were stuck in their own design ways and on and on. Long story short I finally found Nick Latreille, owner at NOBL Web. What sealed it for me besides Nick’s impressive portfolio was the fact that he’s a college professor that has been teaching web and design at a community college for five years and he was willing to listen and execute on MY vision.
After working together and much back and forth between Nick’s ideas and my own we came up with a design that I fell in love with and that I feel presents my images in such a way that my viewers can better feel and experience what I did when I created the image. I’ll let you be the judge, the first image is my old website and the second is my new website.
Nick was super responsive, professional and very creative. Everything I threw at him became the art of the possible and I thoroughly enjoyed our partnership together on this project. I could not recommend him more highly. If you’re considering a revamp of your existing website or a new one and you don’t have the time or confidence to tackle it yourself I’d suggest you reach out to Nick, you will not be disappointed.