Red Kite Creative

The “Minding Your Business” Blog

Show off your work!

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If you’re a photographer, architect, artist, graphic designer, or any type of creative professional who has a body of work to display, getting an image gallery for your website can be a daunting task. Not because there aren’t many choices – on the contrary, there are so many that you may find a hard time choosing!

Here are some of the many creative ways you can present imagery on your site.

  1. The ‘generic’ portfolio: rows of images are familiar and can be styled in many ways from simple to fancy. You can typically create all the categories you need and split images among them. There are many different scripts, plugins and software tools that can make managing this type of gallery easy; others require a little knowledge of HTML.
  2. Slideshows: fade one image into another in a space with defined height and width. Many slideshow scripts have fancy transitions beyond the basic fade and you can add as many images as you like. Slideshows are good for home pages or other pages within your site. View an example of a slideshow.
  3. Sliders: there are many types of content sliders out there. These display images (or any other content) in a containing box of defined height and width. They’re more interactive than the typical slideshow; depending on the script/plugin a visitor can scroll through content using previous/next controls, by clicking on the current image, or by clicking on a set of text links, graphic links, dots or numbers representing each image in the slider’s set. Sliders also can have a variety of fancy transition effects. Sliders are great for home pages – Red Kite has one.
  4. Thumbnails and lightboxes: you can enhance a thumbnail gallery, often used on a blog post, with an interactive lightbox effect. Clicking or hovering on a thumbnail causes the screen to grey out and your image to show up large and bright in the middle of the screen. Most lightboxes allow the visitor to scroll through each image with previous/next buttons without leaving the lightbox popup. Here’s an example of a thumbnail mini-gallery.

Other image tools include Flash photo stacks and portfolios, Polaroid galleries – there are dozens of ways to show off your work. Contact us and we can show you how to more effectively display the best of your work!

New website launch: Team Fort Collins

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Team Fort Collins screenshotRed Kite just launched a new website for Team Fort Collins, a local non-profit that’s been providing alcohol and drug prevention services to the Fort Collins community since 1989. Team approached us about getting a fresh new look and reorganizing the existing content on the site, and also a way for them to more easily edit the site’s content and pages themselves. We suggested WordPress for its ease of use and flexibility for growth.

One of the useful tools we created for Team’s site editors is the DVD/Book Library. Adding new books and DVDs is going to be easier for them thanks to a feature of WordPress called custom post types.

When they need to add a new book, instead of creating a new page on the site all they need to do is click on ‘Add New Book.’ WordPress provides custom entry fields that pertain to books, not pages: Title, Year Published, Author, etc. and a place to upload an image of the book’s cover. Team can choose one or more categories and audiences, then the book will automatically show up in the correct place on the site. Much easier than editing each page and the order of library pages one at a time!

The benefits of hiring a designer/developer

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Finding a professional web designer who’s also a developer (or vice-versa) is more difficult than finding someone who’s strictly one or the other, but it’s worth the extra effort.

Some of the benefits of getting it all in one package include:

  • a much better understanding of what’s feasible (and advisable) on the website. Designers who know nothing about building websites sometimes have ‘interesting’ ideas when it comes to basics like navigation schemes or information architecture; that might include having inconsistent links on different pages (a no-no for usability) or site organization that doesn’t make a lot of sense.
  • nicer-looking designs. Developers who nothing about design – well, you can imagine the types of websites that leads to. A developer who’s also a designer will have a solid understanding of design principals and use of web typography. They’ll also understand the use of white space, use of color, the need to break up content into scannable chunks, and effective use of imagery.
  • pixel-perfect websites. What the designer shows you in Photoshop is (usually) exactly what you get in your website. A designer/developer should be able to take a Photoshop layout and translate it perfectly to HTML and CSS.
  • better-quality code. Compare the code of a designer struggling to build a website with the clean code of a professional developer. It’s better for site maintenance and better for search engines, too.
  • a better understanding of what it’s going to take to build and maintain. A non-developing designer might offer you a beautiful slideshow, but not realize that you’re going to have to learn some HTML in order to maintain it. A designer/developer can advise you on this up front.
  • more possibilities. Someone who’s strictly a designer may have no idea about the options for functionality on a site. A developer will know, and a designer/developer will know when they’re doing the design work. Functionality won’t be an afterthought, it’ll be considered from the start and incorporated into the design.
  • not having to hire two people!

Outlook and your email newsletter

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Are you using a desktop email program to mail out your monthly newsletter? Many businesses do, at least when first getting started. “Why would I pay for something I can do for free?,” you’re asking. It’s a good question.

Managing email campaigns using a system designed especially for that purpose can help you be a smarter newsletter campaigner and avoid headaches by giving you:

  • The ability to analyze your campaigns – you’ll know exactly how many people opened your email, how many many clicked a link, which links they clicked, how many bounces there were and how many signups you’ve had.
  • The ability to create, use and/or edit an HTML template design for your newsletter that matches or complements your website.
  • The ability to test your email design in a variety of desktop, Web, and mobile platforms. This would be extremely expensive if you had to get a copy of each type of device and software to truly test your design.
  • The ability to test your email for spam-iness before it’s sent out.

Using Outlook is a good place to start, but a true campaign management tool has too many benefits to ignore. There are a good variety of online email tools to choose from these days – contact us if you’d like some pointers.