Call us now on: (01908) 239971
Call us now on: (01908) 239971
Kate Everall is a photographer competing in an already saturated market in Milton Keynes. Her website is her portfolio. It’s essential for her business. Like a gallery, her site needs to show her photographs in their best light and create an atmosphere that is both welcoming and professional. Without it, sales are reliant purely on recommendations and paper-based marketing strategies – and that severely restricts the potential for wider business growth.
Kate already had a website, which she’d hoped would be a place to which she could direct people – as a way of highlighting her best work and making future sales. To some extent it did the job, but there were problems: The site was inflexible and it was tortuous and expensive to make even small changes. The site had also been designed in a complicated way, which discouraged Kate from wanting to make the best of this essential resource.
She decided that, rather than try to overcome all these problems, she would transfer the site to another web design company. She wanted her website to work quickly, and she needed to be confident about promoting it – to make the most of its marketing potential.
Kate heard about Prominent Media through a local business network, and she was reassured by Iain Row’s knowledge and experience of web design for small businesses. Iain is managing director and senior web developer and, having heard what he had to say, Kate’s expectations of working with Prominent Media were very high.
“I knew that they were going to be helpful, professional, knowledgeable AND friendly,” says Kate. “The process of moving the site to Prominent Media went more smoothly than I’d expected. Although the existing hosting company didn’t make things easy, Prominent Media is experienced in taking control of sites at various stages of their development.”
The first stage was to hand over the hosting, but after that Iain needed to look at the code. Kate hoped to be able to have a new look on the old site and to rearrange the content, but the original code used was so complicated that it just wasn’t cost-effective. So, for the interim, Prominent Media added a contact form while they set about redesigning the site from scratch.
The redesign went very smoothly and, once the work was finished, the site was up and running within a week.
“Prominent Media redesigned the whole site but incorporated the existing e-commerce to save cost. It was so refreshing to hear Iain say, more than once, that there may be a cheaper way to do things – rather than having him accepting unnecessary work and charging me for it.”
The design of the new site makes it easy to maintain, update and expand, fulfilling the brief from Kate. She’s happy with the look of it, the way it works – and the fact that it has all been so easy.
The improvement in her business is noticeable. She’s had a much higher response via the contact form, and she feels proud to direct people to the website to show off her work.
“Now my website does things I didn’t expect. I wanted it to showcase my work and have flexibility so that I can make changes myself. It does that, but I wasn’t expecting it to move up in the Google rankings, too – but it did! Prior to the new site going live I was lucky if it got anywhere near searchable with the keyword ‘photographer Milton Keynes’, but as a result of Prominent Media’s work, I’ve just sold a gift voucher to someone from Bath!”
Kate Everall, Kate Everall Photography“Now my website does things I didn’t expect. I wanted it to showcase my work and have flexibility so that I can make changes myself. It does that, but I wasn’t expecting it to move up in the Google rankings, too – but it did! Prior to the new site going live I was lucky if it got anywhere near searchable with the keyword ‘photographer Milton Keynes’, but as a result of Prominent Media’s work, I’ve just sold a gift voucher to someone from Bath!”