Custom Photography Blog – Jules Bianchi Photography

One of the most complex and intricate custom blogs I have put together so far was for Jules Bianchi Photography. Like most of my photographers in need of a custom blog, Jules had an existing and well established brand identity with a portfolio site already in place. Her blog however had been on Blogger, where customization and options are limited.

A while back, I had also done a custom splash page for the main site, with links to all of her sites and the blog.

A look at the Splash Page

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A look at the portfolio site

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A look at the Blog

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Details: Post Titles

There were lots of little details that added to the finished blog, a combination of design elements and custom programming to add some life to the site.

With a long list of posts in a blog-style layout, there is an opportunity to add imagery between the posts or surrounding the titles as a way to help separate one post from the next. I used a combination of things for Jules’ blog. Behind the title, I added a version of the swirl design and flowers that make up the background of the site.

To the left of each post is a set of icons that change depending on the category – cake for weddings, camera for photographer related posts, a house for portraits and a dog for dog portraits.

Details: Custom Images for Post Titles

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Details: Custom Comments on the Home Page

Usually comments are made on the permanent page for a single post. When you are looking at a long list of posts, you first have to click onto another page and wait for it to load before making a comment. But with a little bit of trickery, WordPress can list the comments for each post anywhere, including right under each post on the home page.

You can also have some fun with the text area where you type in the comments. Adding the three information boxes across the top helped save space and the little flower makes another appearance as the background of the textarea.

Details: Custom Comments

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Details: Custom Social Media Links and Welcome Area

One of the most important aspects of building a web presence is to connect all of the different parts to each other and make sure they are easy to find. Right across the top of the site, just under the fading slideshow header area, there is an area with a picture, the most recent Twitter status, easy to find links to Twitter and Facebook, a series of links to Jules’ other important sites, and a little link for her book, Olive Goes to Hollywood. Another interesting twist was to make the image of Jules randomly change on each page load. Try refreshing the site and the image will change every time.

Details: Connecting

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Details: Custom 404 Error Page

This is one of the most overlooked aspects of any site… What happens when something goes wrong? If you have ever reached a site that said something like ‘The Page you are looking for can not be found,” you are looking at what is called a 404 error page. 404 refers to the numerical code thrown back to the browser by the server. The technical aspect is one thing, but generally, these pages are ugly and not very helpful. The standard WordPress 404 will simply provide a serach box, if anything and will probably be a plain page. But wouldn’t it be more helpful to provide suggestions for what the visitor might be looking for?

It is possible to add an instant search result to these pages, using the url that the person was looking for. Rather than saying the site can not find that page, we have the site do a quick search and see if it finds anything close. This is great because a lot of these errors are just misspellings or typos. But the search will probably find it. Just in case the search fails, I also have it list the categories and archives links.

To see it in action try this link http://julesbianchi.com/blog/Four Seasons & Il Cielo . You can sse that there are blank spaces and an ampersand in the link and there is definitely no URL there. But instead of an error, the site offers several posts that relate to those locations.

You can see another example of this in my post about the custom blog for Plum Tree Studios.

Details: Custom 404 Page

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