Personal Photography Portfolio

I love photography. I build websites. I tried and failed on many occasions to find a portfolio website template or a place to show my photographs. I disliked them all - none of them showcased the photographs well and most of them had stupidly expensive monthly fees. I then started to build my own, before realising that as an unpaid project it was going to be even more expensive (in time lost) than signing up for an existing solution. So I decided to do what I know best and build a Shopify website. Six hours later I was live. I am not a designer by any means, but for this project I wanted to do it all. I designed the logo, selected the fonts, decided the colour scheme (a photographer might recognise it), and built the site. It's probably not to everyone's taste, but I am the client and I think it is a peach.

This website shows that Shopify can be used for a "brochure" or non-commerce website. It is much easier to work with than Wix or Squarespace and frankly the results are in another league. Each photograph is a blog post with "metadata" for the Camera, Tech Spec, etc. Every time I add a new blog post the website automatically adds it to the appropriate menus, panels, and filters.

It is interesting to contrast this website with Dr. Sylvia - The Skin GP which I put live the same week. That is also a brochure website and I actually started building it in pure HTML, but early in the build Dr. Sylvia mentioned that she may look at e-commerce at some point. I pivoted to save her a future rebuild cost. Her website is designed by our in-house designer Paul - he picked the fonts, specified the colours, and designed the logo. Its interesting to contrast the clean, professional, sharp look of her website with the edgier and slightly more "studenty" vibe or one designed by a website developer rather than a website designer!