This is the blog post I’ve been tossing around in my head for the past few weeks. I was prompted to revisit the subject by an email from another photographer who was considering changing their web site design.

Last year, I hired Nadine Brown, an amazing designer to rework my logo, color scheme and to put together a marketing plan. She designed an email campaign, two killer brochures plus a new web site. Nadine is of those people blessed with patience and the fire to do it right. Nadine with her husband Jason, own Lost Luggage plus Brand Envy. She is smart, savvy and easy to work with. She recently completed the branding for the National Geographic assignment division.

I wanted to change the website from the html based site that Nadine designed, to one that was more fluid and easier to change at will. Enter Haggart of APhotoEditor fame and the what could have been difficult became very easy. Rob launched a new company called APhotoFolio. They create websites for photographers that work from the Art Buyer and Photo Editors perspective. Haggart knows his stuff, he was a photo editor at Outside and Men’s Journal before leaving the big city for the open spaces of the American West.

Nadine insisted that I keep my branding colors, logos, etc in the new site. She did not want me to toss the good out when I made a change in site structure. Rob and I spoke quite a bit about sizing, color schemes and getting it right. Rob reworked the colors, made the logo work with instructions from Nadine and his own sense of design. It may change, but it works for me.

What I enjoyed about this process was the commitment from Nadine and Rob was to make sure that the site and branding was done to my satisfaction and more importantly, to their own level of what they felt was the perfect combination of color, ease of use and showing the photography.

Here are two sites that Haggart also hosts. Troy House.com is an NYC ad shooter I know and Matt Laver, a Scottish Architectural shooter.

Even though both of these sites are the same template as mine, the color and images chosen by Matt and Troy reflect who they are and the sites do not feel like a template.