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Kerrie Mitchell Photography

20 May

I After a month long absence due to Bronchitis and other life things (thanks Obama!), we’re reviewing Kerrie Mitchell’s site. She’s a photographer in Essex (which is across the pond in the land of Britains. Brilliant!)

So first off, we’re dealing with a Flash site here. When I do speaking engagements, I jokingly bring up that Steve Jobs killed Flash in 2007, and ask why anyone would still be using it in 2015!
I just had a look at a client’s site statistics from England. And Tablets account for 20% of her traffic! That 20% of people CANNOT view your website!

But you’re in a perfect situation. You have a WordPress blog as well. The wonderful thing about WordPress is that it can also be used as a website. many people still misleadingly think of it as a Blog only. But all the sites we build here at Flaunt Your Site are built on WordPress. Even using what looks like a ProPhoto theme, you can have yourself a good website, with a Blog as one of your pages.

So, my suggestion to you would be to migrate the WordPress site over to the main domain, set up the proper redirects and use your WordPress site. You’ll all of a sudden gain an additional 20% or more brides that can access your site again. You may have an HTML version that gets displayed, but it’s typically a far inferior experience (and often times looks nothing like), the desktop version. Setting up consistent SEO on sites like that is impossible too, since the two versions be shown as two separate sites which creates a dilemma for Google in which to crawl, index and display.
The best solution is an actual responsive website.

I won’t comment too much on the Flash site. It’s pretty. It’s unique. I’m sure people are drawn into it when they get there. And all of this design is completely achievable with a WordPress site.

Heading over to the blog, I’m surprised at the width the site takes up. It’s ginormous! Most sites are designed to be about 960 pixels wide, but yours is a whopping 1,500 pixels wide. Anyone on a smaller screen won’t see the whole site. Part of it gets cut off on my MacBook Air. And many people are using netbooks to do their surfing. I know ProPhoto isn’t responsive, but you shouldn’t assume that everyone has 27″ iMacs to look at your site on.

Design wise, I think the blog, could bring more of the elements of the website into it. As a customer if I went from one to the other, it would feel like going to another website. Not entirely, but there’s enough of a disconnect to throw someone off. That’s where making one WordPress site would help bigtime. You’d have the same consistency throughout the site.
One thing that really stands out for me is the use of plain old Arial for the fonts. I love typefaces and would really recommend you find something that fits in a bit more with the style of the site.
The large text quotes especially stick out since they the generic font. In music, there’s an expression used called “sitting in the pocket” when the bass player is playing the right notes in a grove, and lines right up with the drummer, he’s “sitting in the pocket” the same goes for design. There’s just some places where Arial “sits in the pocket” and other times it just looks a bit off.
Conversely, the call to actions you have at the bottom of each post is very, very tiny. You want people to notice these. Because this is how you get clients.