Day Trip Photo is a new web site with hints and tips for getting the most out of your day to day photography.

When considering the design of a web site it is vital to consider early on the use of photographic images. Images are vital to any web site, but they must be appropriate and must support the message conveyed by the words. We tend to naturally look for images as a means of judging the tone of an article. Although this may not be the best way to judge content, in an environment where attention span can be reduced to mere seconds it is vital to support words with appropriate images. These images draw the attention and contribute to the perceived professionalism of the site and the content.

A new visitor to a web site will come to subjective conclusions about the site, the content, the authors or businesses based on their initial perceptions of the quality of the design and imagery. It helps, then, to make sure that the photographs are: present, of high quality & appropriate to the content. How does your site stack up?

I’ve just completed a redesign of the web site for Grace Magazine. They wanted to go for a more contemporary look than the previous site, whilst simplifying the access to the content of previous issues. The previous site was overly complex with some broken links, so we reduced the navigation to a small set of main navigation tabs. This makes it simpler to see what is on offer. The home page was to contain a description of the latest magazine with a link to previous issues.

As with all design work, it is often necessary to put something together based on an initial specification in order to allow the client to see and decide which direction to go. We went through a couple of design iterations that weren’t quite contemporary enough, but arrived at a bold modern style with direct links to excerpts from the magazines in PDF format. Take a look and see what you think…