Creative Professional Practice - Website Development

Website Development and Justification

From my old website, I made a few changes to the top bar. Firstly, I had added a YouTube logo under my website to link my channel. This will make it easier for any viewers to check out my video work. I have also moved the positioning of the text with ‘Rikhil Majithia’ and ‘Photographer and Videographer’ which is now in a more suitable position and is easier to read than where it was positioned before.

I have also added a new tab. ‘New York’. This includes my images from my first trip to New York with the university. Once my images from the second trip have been edited, I will carefully select the best images from the trip and upload the best shots. This will allow other people to research my work and they may use it for their research.

I have also used one of my videos for the home page, playing on a loop. I used my crystal ball video as it is one of my most popular videos with nearly 2000 views on YouTube. However, using my footage from filming videos for ‘Ibbies World’ I will make a little showreel and have it on a loop for the home page to entice the audience viewing my website. This could potentially lead to receiving job offers in the YouTube industry in the future. The only issue with this, is that Wix are currently working on background videos with sound, so at this moment in time, the looped showreel will not have any sound.

This is a gallery I created on Wix. I decided to go with this cool and funky slideshow of a small portfolio of what my interests are. The slideshow is something different to what you usually see and therefore I went ahead with this choice. I wanted to present my work in a different style to most photographers and I think this gallery style showcases my photography style.

For the New York photographs, I decided to have a gallery, in which once clicked, it opens up into a bigger file with a caption. This makes it easier for the viewers to view the photographs. The captions are a small title describing the image. I didn’t want to write too much about each photo, keeping it quick and simple. The simple side of things matches my editing style and how I work as a photographer.

I then decided to use a different style gallery. This one is more common to my portfolio gallery. This one is more common because you are able to view an image at a decent size whilst being able to see the other images as a little thumbnail. It is also easier to navigate as it scrolls down and you can click and choose the image you want to view.

I have my own blog using blogger and I found a way to link my blog into my website and have it as another tab for the audience. This will boost up my blog numbers and also get more coverage globally. There wasn’t much choice of how the blog looks on the website. It would be nice if you could see the image on this screen, but wasn’t an option. However, it does mean they have to click on the individual blog posts to read my blog and view the images from each post.

We had a seminar around websites. One piece of information that was useful was not to mention I am a current student at De Montfort University so I had removed some text to make myself sound more professional rather than a student. If a potential client found out that I’m a current student then, this would give them an advantage when booking me for any jobs. Instead of paying, they could just promote my social media rather than paying for the job and that puts me at a loss.

One final change I had made to my website was finally purchasing a domain name. Unfortunately www.autofocusphotography.co.uk was taken so I was at a standstill, stuck between two domain names. They were autofocusphoto.co.uk or my name - rikhilmajithia.co.uk. In the end, I decided to go for autofocusphoto as it is easier to spell, type, and matches my instagram username. However, in the future, if anything ever happens to my business and I end up changing the whole brand, I can always purchase my name as the domain as it is a unique name, 

I believe my website matches my personality as a photographer. Simple but also complicated in different ways. I wanted to keep the colour scheme, the fonts all simple and suitable for my business. I would then keep this colour scheme for any extras such as business cards, like a uniform. Everything I updated, changed and removed from when my website went live last was for a reason. I had new images to show, removed text to make myself sound more professional and made text clearer to read.