CM&M Photography

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Link: CM&M Photography

Opportunity: New photography company wanted to establish a web presence that showcased their work, first and foremost, without having to do a fully custom build.

Process: Not all design projects require you to touch absolutely everything. When CM&M Photography came to use asking for help with a website, the primary focuses were on speed and showcasing the photography in a large, eye-catching way.

Now, when most designers are told to “go make a website,” they usually jump at the chance to offer pixel-perfect custom designs that require dozens of hours of work in Photoshop and Illustrator, and often cause developers to bash their heads against their keyboards (well, more than usual) when the circle around the icon is “too round.”

That’s not how we roll. We can absolutely provide you a custom-designed website from scratch if you have very specific needs (and, quite often, development needs often drive custom designs more than anything else, because modifying themes for functionality is often harder than building from scratch). But most often, what people need is a nice look that works well with content that already exists (or some minor reworking).

In this case, we found a free photography theme that looked gorgeous … with a few problems:

• Couldn’t handle a horizontal logo (and you don’t redesign a logo just for a website)
• No place for call-to-action buttons
• No ability to modify captions for photos based on where they showed up
• A pretty broken mobile header
• Completely broken social media integration

Fortunately, that’s where we come in. We modified the theme to fit the needs of the business (Now you can read their logo and everything!) and they didn’t have to pay for a fully custom design from scratch. We also wanted to make the price list a little more visually interesting, so we spruced it up a bit and provided some simple explanatory graphics.

Result: A satisfied customer who got to use our expertise to make necessary changes to an existing theme without having to pay for a fully custom design.