Some final words and things to consider before going live with the website.
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 must be easily read and navigated 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 adapts when the browser gets smaller or bigger?
There are thousands of photography websites online, so how do you stand out? SEO is the keyword here (Search Engine Optimization). I use the Rank Math SEO Pro plugin 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 essential part is writing good content and naming the photos. Most website designers ignore 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
There is no doubt that the speed of a website is crucial for the overall user 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. I use the WP Rocket plugin and Cloudflare’s CDN to minimize load time.
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! You are never too old to learn…
Update: Click here to read Developing a Website Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6
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