The new website and blog have been up for about 2 weeks now, and many have you seen it obviously, but I wanted to share an interview with us that was featured on the NY Wedding Boutique website. There’s a bunch of changes obviously, but one of my personal favorites is now being able to watch our wedding films from almost any device – computer, laptop, ipad, and phone. We’re really excited about this new site and we hope you have been enjoying some of the new features. I explain some of them below:
1.) Why did you all at Clark+Walker Studio want to change your website?
We decided last Fall that we needed to update our overall web presence. At the time people were browsing their mobile phones a lot, but not a ton of people used it in such a serious way as finding their wedding photographer. However the iPad changed that, now people were using mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad all the time, and since our website was flash people could NOT see our website from those devices. That was extremely scary to me, because I could see the popularity for these devices rising. In addition when the original website was built, cinematography was such a tiny part of what we did as a company that it was almost an after-thought with the design, and it felt that way. This time it’s just as large a part of the website as our photography, and even better the films all load extremely fast and even play on mobile devices.
2.) What can we find on your new site that wasn’t there before?
The first thing we added was a gallery of runway photos and behind the scenes photos from Bridal Fashion week. We are commissioned by The Knot to shoot a ton of fashion shows for their magazine, and it’s something that’s very popular with the fans of our studio so we wanted to be able to share that all the time. In addition we added our latest wedding film, which we just showed at Proctors Theatre as well. From the blog side of things we’ve added a better search tool, much more categories to browse, and a “you might also like” feature at the bottom of posts that gives people the option of checking out similar work.
3.) What’s your favorite aspect of the new site?
The blog and website are married now, on the same site. Before we had the regular flash website and then had a totally separate blog site. Now with this new version of clarkwalkerstudio.com, everything is together under one home. I think this will make the website itself more popular and easy to view, and in addition we can even update that ourselves so it will be consistently updated with fresh work.
4.) I noticed you utilized your facebook page to get feedback from others – did your past brides help you make decisions and/or give you new ideas?
Absolutely! This was something I didn’t anticipate, I thought I might get a comment or two but between the comments on facebook and a couple emails I was able to add some great user functionality that I personally would not have thought of. I had one of my brides tell me adding categories that bride could search by time of the year, man what a great idea that was. Now if you are having a winter wedding and you want ideas for a winter wedding (which aren’t nearly as common as other times of the year), you just select the winter category and you’ve got all the wedding inspiration you can look at. In addition, I had another person suggest we add categories for venues since we work a lot in the Capital Region. This makes it easy for bloggers who are looking for weddings in their venue, as well as brides who are looking for those venues.
5.) What kind of message/impression do you want your website to give about your company?
I know anyone who knows us here at C+W knows we either like to do things right, or don’t do them at all. And in 2011 having an awesome web presence is of extreme importance. I felt like the older website was done on flash, wasn’t super easy to update, the videos loaded very slowly, the blog and website were separate (sooo 2008!) and the website didn’t load on mobile devices. All of those things sort of built up to make me feel like our web presence wasn’t representing the company in the best light. We pride ourselves in being the type of company that’s buzz-worthy, the kind of brand that you instantly share with your friends and who you keep tabs on because they are always doing cool things. This new website brings our web presence more in line with that philosophy.
In addition you Google Reader people out there might not have even noticed that our new site has been launched! Here are some of the new functions of the blog:
VENUE TAB
The venue tab has been the most popular addition to our blog, and I’ve been having people asking me for it for 2 years. Now if you aren’t sure where to get married you’ve got a great gallery of local venues to check out. If you want to see a bunch of our work here are a ton of weddings to browse. In addition if you are getting married at the Hall of Springs, now you can flip through weddings we’ve done at your location. We’ll be adding venues as we see fit, but we’re mostly going to keep it to places we shoot at more than once or have more weddings there in the future.
CATEGORIES TAB
Categories were another sorely lacking feature that we now have. If you want to browse by wedding photos, videos, summer wedding, winter wedding, photobooths, engagement shoots…. anything you want to see of ours is now an easy click away.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
You no doubt have seen this feature on other wedding blogs, a bunch of them have this feature, but it’s so genius that I had to include it as well. I saw this on a wedding blog I frequent last year and before I knew it was about 45 minutes into my night flipping through “you might also like” posts. I was like oh yea we need this! We’ve set it up so it just features posts in the same category. For example if you are viewing a post that is listed under engagement shoots (like this one) then it will list other engagement shoots under the post for you to view. That way the content is relevant and hopefully helpful to you. In addition you can click on the “like” button to the right anytime as well – I’m sure that doesn’t need any explanation :)
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