Aponte Studios is coming up to its 5th year anniversary and I thought about maybe changing couple things here and there; biggest of all changes was the website. Apontestudios.com has been through many changes throughout the years and it's mostly because I couldn't make up my mind on how I wanted the site to be laid out until some time during the summer of last year. Summer of 2010, I spent many sleepless nights tweaking the page's code to come out with what used to look like this...
I liked the fact that it was dark because it would allow the pictures to stand out even more, but I knew I could make it better with a little more time invested. After spending days researching forums, blogs and other photographers' website, I then saw that maybe going dark wasn't the right way to go... eh, live and learn.
I love taking pictures of weddings. I honestly can say that it's my favorite type of event because it really keeps me busy and for the most part, it's filled with beautiful people and decorations; enough eye-candy to fill a 32gig memory card pretty quick. One thing I was looking for in particular were those photographers that specialized in weddings and studied their sites. I mostly noticed how there wasn't much wording and it was mostly about the pictures. Photographers from California to New York were mostly using a lot of white, so my decision was simple... I must turn away from the DARK SIDE. LOL!
So, if you haven't seen the new "lighter side" apontestudios.com yet, here's a screen shot of it...
If you've visited the site before, your browser could possibly be holding on to some cache from the older site, so be sure to press F5 to refresh the page and get the new one.
It's clean, but still keeps some of the basic structure I had before. I also wanted to make it super simple to navigate through. I found that many of my clients were not really going through all the categories with the older website, so I merged many of my pictures to one generic category. Not only did I simplify the tabs, but I also eliminated the pull down menus, again, I found people were just skimming through the upper-level menus. A pretty cool feature I added, which is nothing new to anybody except apontestudios.com, are the quick links to the social networking sites on the upper right hand corner.
The contact page is my favorite feature, which I know my web programming teacher would be proud of. Lots of background validation and it gives me the right information I need when I receive the emails. Also, it sends the potential clients a pretty nice "thank you" email after they submitted their information.
Overall, everything has and will always be about the clients. It's not so much what I would like to see online, but what the clients would like to see and how easy it is to use it.
On a similar topic, this is a screen shot of my very first official apontestudios.com... good lord, what was I thinking? LOL
When Aponte Studios celebrates its 10 year anniversary, I'll probably look back at all this and laugh... of course, with God's blessing, the business will grow, learn, change / adapt to provide the best services it possibly can.
Thank you to all those beautiful people I've had the pleasure of serving throughout these last 5 years!
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