I’ve found the whole process of creating a website quite daunting because there’s so many options for website platforms and designs that it can all get a bit overwhelming. In second year, I created my website on ‘Wix’ which was okay but I found it was very minimalistic to what you could do. I wanted to find a platform that allowed you to start from scratch, and easily to.

Looking back at this website now, I think it looks really unprofessional. The way the home page is displayed with a slide show of photographs looks too simple and boring. I’m not looking for complexity with my website but I believe that it would look a lot better and more enticing if the home page layout was bolder and more striking with the arrangement of my photographs.

The page layout below for my ‘landscape’ section of my website doesn’t look so bad as it is an easy way to look at each of the photographs. I was able to show them as full sized photographs without having to crop them in this layout which was a bonus but I still feel as though I wasn’t showing my photographs off to their full potential. Looking at it now, I don’t think that it is necessary to include text within each of my pages. I want my website to be minimalist, easy to navigate and effective and I don’t believe that this website platform enables me to do this, or even the layout that I have chosen to work with.

After this realisation, I started looking for other platforms. I researched other photographer’s websites to gauge what professionals were using to maximise their audiences. I came across a few that I thought were really powerful in attracting audiences attention but found that I really liked Yulya Dahl’s website and front page because it was so different to any that I had seen before. I liked how the photographer used a staggered design to switch up the photographs, I thought this was really engaging for an audience member. It was also clear that they were able to play around with their design a lot more and had a lot more choice for layouts. It turned out that they did their website on a platform called ‘Cargo’…

After looking at this website, I decided to look into Cargo myself to see how it worked and if I would get on with it okay. I needed a platform that I could continue to work with when I left university so I want it to be one that is easy to use. I decided to start working with Cargo to see if it was something that I could work on so I signed up for it and began building my website. I really liked how incredibly stripped back Cargo was. You are literally able to create your website from scratch when you are presented with a blank white page. This, I discovered, gave me so many options for what I could do and where I could go with it. Which I actually found quite overwhelming when it came to it and where to put my images. The photos below are the startings of my website on Cargo and show the kind of format that I decided to go for on that platform. I think if I were to stick with this platform then I would eventually get on with it but I just found it to be too much of a nightmare. This would especially be frustrating when I wanted to keep my site updated, as I intend to do.

I didn’t find Cargo the easiest platform to navigate around, in fact, I found it quite difficult because it was so open and the template, well it wasn’t really there. With that in mind, I decided to look at photographer’s who I am inspired by as I thought that this would be a telling option when seeing what platform they used.

So I looked at Cian Oba Smith’s website which I would class as fairly simple, yet vert effective. Searching through his website was so easy and I was able to navigate around it without getting frustrated. His home page featured a lot of his photographs so that you could get a feel for Cian as a photographer. I believe that this touch is really important to use as a photographer so that people can judge for themselves whether they want to delve in to your website further or not at the click of a button. His layout, below, is really simple in the way that he has literally just used square icons to show off his photographs which are all sized the same anyway.

Researching photographer’s websites got me excited to re-create mine because I saw all of the different possibilities for what I could use. I searched for what platform Cian used and discovered that it is ‘Format’ so I decided to look into the platform to see if it was accessible and easy use.

With all of this in mind, after much deliberation and searching for website platforms I decided to use ‘format’ which I actually discovered to be so easy and beginner friendly!

I am now working on ‘Format’ and finding it the easiest out of all the platforms but also feeling the most benefit from it. I think this is a platform that will be the easiest to navigate around and continue to work on so I am happy with the progress so far. I am able to create new pages but also follow their templates if I wish so it works really well for me, as a beginner to website design.