Responsiveness
Desktop, Tablet and Mobile
Before smartphones and tablets became popular, responsiveness was not a topic to consider in the design world. Today it’s another story. If your website is not responsive, you lose visitors. With all those different resolutions, a website needs to be easy to read and navigate on any device. This means extra work for designers and developers, restrictions in layout building, but also new opportunities. If you are now reading this article on a desktop or laptop computer, you can test this by resizing your browser. Did you see how everything gets adapted when the browser gets smaller or bigger?
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
It’s all about getting found
There are thousands of photography websites online, so how do you stand out? SEO is the keyword here (Search Engine Optimization). I’m using the Rank Math SEO Pro plug-in to optimize my WordPress website. Every photo has an Alt, Title and Description tag, and it is present in my sitemap_index.xml. In that way, it can easily be found by search engines.
But the most important part is trying to write good content and naming the photos. Most website designers don’t pay attention to renaming the photos/images they upload. A photo straight from a camera is usually named DSC0001.jpg, and search engines can’t know what kind of topic that photo represents. So when a photo shows an Amazon Kingfisher, I rename it accordingly as amazon-kingfisher.jpg
Speed
There is no doubt that the speed of a website is crucial for the overall user’s experience. Site speed is a huge reason why people bounce off of sites. If a website has a slow load time, people will not stick around, and they will bounce. That’s why I use the WP Rocket plugin together with Cloudflare’s CDN to minimize load time.
Some Final Words
I hope you liked this multi-blog series about developing a website. In no way was this an in-depth tutorial but more like a journey into my website development of this site. If you have any comments or critiques, I’m always open to debate! Never too old to learn…
Links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Products used to build this website
- WordPress (Content Management System)
Plug-ins
- Oxygen Builder (Page and theme builder)
- Oxygen Gutenberg Integration (Insert Oxygen blocks inside Gutenberg)
- Oxy Ultimate (Extra widgets for Oxygen)
- Gridbuilder WP (Advanced grid layouts with faceted search)
- Gridbuilder WP – Oxygen Addon (Oxygen integration)
- Code Snippets (Inject code into your functions.php file)
- Custom Post Type UI (Custom posts creation tool)
- Advanced Custom Fields Pro (Custom field creation tool)
- Contact Form 7 (Form builder)
- FileBird (Media Manager for the back-end)
- Novashare (Social share buttons)
- WP Rocket (Caching and optimizing)
- Rank Math SEO Pro (Optimizing websites for search engines)
