Website design fotobelle.com

As usual great fun to work with Isabelle and Jeroen from Easy site now. 

Isabelle called me if I wanted to design her new website.

Vincent van Vliet en Jeroen Bakker webdesigner and owner @ Easy site now kindly agreed to be our back-up team.

Isabelle had chosen a Wordpress template from flowthemes. They have beautiful templates especially designed for wedding photographers. The flow-theme Rosemary webdesign was a very romantic design which did not really express what Isabelles photography is about. She loves a journalistic approach, so a bit more than romance, the full package; real live. Besides working as a wedding photographer Isabelle coaches and mentors other photographers. Her style and what she teaches had to be visable to make sure visitors know what they can expect when they start working with her. 

Please take a look on the website if you like to see her work, underneath you will read about the process.

Based on the Rosemary template we started to plan what to do. Some things we wanted weren't possible in the template. We asked Jeroen for advice; who told us the wordpress templates he uses (Bridge) had easy to work with templates if we would buy one of those it would be much easier to adjust things. We looked at Bridge, which is perfect and beautiful but you need a bit more knowledge. Flowtheme's backend was very user friendly so in the future perfect for Isabelle and her team to take over and do all the adjustments themselves. Besides we had already bought the Rosemary theme, so we asked the Flow-theme builders for their advice. They recommended us to choose a newer theme with more options to alter the template, more building blocks and work around options. They allowed us to exchange the theme we bought for Crowd Neo. Jeroen was there to help us with the coding. 

Time to start building.

This was the old logo

The old logo did not work well in the menu. Isabelle was very happy with the illustration we made on the back of her business cards, so we combined that with the font we picked for the header. It is a google font; the Montserrat. It is a big type family so perfect to work with. We had used the Brandon Gothic for her previous website a type I really like, but it has been used very much these days and it has a bit of a vintage look, we where looking for a type that looked clean and simple and a bit bold (fearless). The Montserrat seemed to have the clean basic look would not attract to much attention away from the pictures and combined with the Akzidenz-grotesk BQ condensed we felt it expressed the honest and open photography approach Isabell has. 

For the logo I made a couple of proposals of which Isabell choose this one.

This the one used for the website.

These are some of the other options. 

FotoBelle is written without a space and the first character of both words is written with a capital. For a logo it seemed a bit to many sizes in one line. Therefor we choose capitals for every character plain and simple combined with the illustration. 

Sketches for the favicon

The old favicon was a simple B 

The final favicon.

When you land on a page you see a line of text explaining where you are, every page starts with a slider, you can move to the left or right or scroll down. So many sliders in one website could get confusing so we decided to add some text.

Example of one of the quotes we implemented in the sliders

This is how it looks combined with her pictures.

Isabelle became photographer of the year during the process. A well deserved award from Fearless Photographers the directory of the world's best wedding pictures.

We used some colourful pictograms simple but colourful on move over you could see what studio Foto Belle can do for you

Blog and portfolio spread into other pages with sliders and blogposts.

On click you go to the other page, can browse through a slider and again when you land on the page you can see where you are because of the text in the middle of the slider.

Other font to emphasise you are not in the main menu.

If you want coaching or mentoring you can choose one of three packages. 

The contact page

Have a nice day!