By using some nifty animation techniques, coupled with an elegant design, the FastLine team was able to create a truly memorable web experience. While the example images below are nice, be sure to visit East Elm Photography on the web to get the full experience.

Homepage Slideshow

Gallery Navigation

Gallery Slideshow

After their project was finished, Aaron and Melissa were nice enough to write us a stellar review. Here is what they had to say about their experience working with FastLine Media:

“We are a husband/wife photography team based out of Wisconsin that used Fastline to design a custom website for our photography business. We knew we wanted a site that was sophisticated and elegant but also very stylish. We absolutely love our website : ) Robby totally NAILED IT!!! It is seriously amazing!

We both thought at first that we should use someone local to sit down with and discuss our wants and needs because it would be an easier process. We used Fastline once before for our first site so we just said “hey why not let them have a go at it” and we couldn’t imagine our site looking like anything else!
Robby was incredible to work with. He was very responsive to all of our emails, answered all questions that we had (which were a lot!) and gave us his opinion on numerous things which was very nice.

A website is really your identity. You always want to make an impression on a possible client, and it’s the first thing they see when they want to see or know more of your work. We feel that our website is lightyears ahead, and it sets us apart from our competition. Fastline really listens to what your needs are and meets or exceeds them!“

SEO has two basic parts to it. Firstly, a search engine has to find your website and decide which search terms your website is related to. If your blog is a collection of stories about running, you would want Google and company to show your website when someone searches for “running stories”, but also if someone searched for “exercise anecdotes”. This part of the job is usually done through changes you make to your own website, which SEOs call “on-page SEO”.

After it decides which websites are related to which search terms, a search engine has to decide which of all the websites related to “running stories” is the best, which is the second best, and so on to make the best results page possible for users. If your website is linked to by a lot of other websites, it is a good indication that you are a popular, authoritative website. This is by no means the only criterion search engines use to rank websites (according to Google, their algorithm uses hundreds of ranking factors), but it is a fairly reliable one. Getting more links to your website, which falls under “off-page SEO”, will almost always improve your website’s ranking in search engine results.

WordPress makes blogging really easy and offers tons of themes, widgets, and plugins to take your website’s functionality anywhere, even without extensive knowledge of HTML or CSS. It has the capacity to be configured for a blog, for ecommerce, or as any other kind of website. A less well-known feature of WordPress is that it is built to be SEO-friendly right out of the box! Even without SEO plugins, the basic WordPress framework includes tools to do simple on and off page SEO with permalinks and blogrolling.

• Permalinks help build meaningful URLs for your pages. By default, WordPress builds the URLs for your pages to be short and useful to a computer, such as: www.mysite.com/?p=555. It’s not very helpful for a human looking at the website, and it’s not very helpful for search engines scanning the Internet, either. Instead of page addresses full of garbled numbers and letters, WordPress gives you easy ways to change your addresses to a number of simpler, more easy-to-understand formats (i.e. “www.mysite.com/posts/2013/01/running-for-my-wife/”).
• Blogrolling is an easy way for you to get connected with other blogs on the Internet. You can find blogs you like and add them to your blogroll with WordPress, and others can do the same to your blog to increase your Internet connectivity. The more people who have you on their blogrolls, the more popular you look in Google’s eyes.

Aside from the technical features included in the WordPress blog framework, lots of optimization has to do with the content of a website. As the content creator, the burden to do the following falls to you:

• Make sure your website’s navigation is complete. Organize your website so that people and search engine “spiders” can reach every page easily.
• Have search keywords (“Running Stories” in our above example) in mind when you are writing your content. Include them a few times in the body and headings of your pages.
• Match the keywords in your titles to your content. If you aren’t already, pay attention to titles. Search engines do! Plugins like the one I mention later make this super easy.
• Make sure search engines can “read” your content. What your website looks like to a human visitor is not what it looks like to a computer. Search engines read through your written information more than anything, and a search engine can’t actually look at an image or video to analyze its content (yet), but it can read the image title and the alt descriptions you’ve given them. The same is true for links.

If you are getting deeper into SEO, there are a number of dedicated SEO plugins for WP. My favorite plugin is the “WordPress SEO” plugin by Yoast. It has an easy enough interface that almost anybody can get started using it immediately, and enough features that you could get really SEO-geeky with it if you wanted. It also comes with lots of tutorials and instruction to get you off on the right foot!

Joe Dawson works for PrintingPeach.ca, a Canadian customer-service focused printing/branding/web design-and-marketing company.

A recent goal of ours has been to create new templates that are more than just your logo, navigation and a slideshow, giving you a comprehensive tool for marketing your photo business on SmugMug. Don’t take our word for it, have a look at the new designs below and let us know what you think in the comments!

If you want to see more, you can view all of our offerings on our SmugMug Templates page.

Premier

Premier is an elegant responsive template with an awesome new photo slider and plenty of room for your marketing message on the homepage.

View the Premier Light or Premier Dark demos.

Metro

Metro is slick responsive template with large photos and a homepage full of content to keep your visitors engaged longer!

View the Metro Template demo.

Refined

Refined is a responsive “fullscreen” template that lets your photos and marketing message shine in tandem.

View the Refined Light and Refined Dark demos.

WaterColor

WaterColor is a fun new template with a lot of life… and color!

View the WaterColor Template demo.

For Sale

For Sale is a unique new template geared towards Fine Art photographers looking to sell prints online. This template takes a different approach to displaying your images using an “Art Gallery” style layout instead of a standard slideshow. Click an image in the art gallery and BOOM, you’re instantly directed to the shopping cart to purchase prints for that photo.

View the For Sale Template demo.

When we were contacted by uberfood, it was apparent they needed a new website FAST! They had a launch date on the calendar, and it was paramount that their website be up and running before their scheduled debut. Team FastLine was able to put our heads together, create an amazing web experience, and fine-tune uberfoodsd.com to launch it just before the buzzer.

We are huge fans of WordPress at FastLine Media, and we contemplated using it for uberfood. But, they suggested an up and coming shopping platform called Shopify. We were a bit weary on the idea as we tend to avoid using “flavor of the month” website solutions. But, Shopify is nothing of the sorts, and we really enjoyed building on the Shopify platform.

Working on Shopify was a bit different from our standard version control/FTP workflow. All of a website’s assets need to be hosted on Shopify, and there is no FTP/SFTP access. To edit our files, we found an amazing Sublime Text 2 plugin that enabled us to work on Shopify assets directly from our favorite text editor. The plugin is called SublimeShopify  (available here) and I highly recommend it to anyone working on Shopify.

Building a food truck website on Shopify was a great experience for our team. uberfood launched their service in November 2012, and started filling orders the first day! Are you in need of a Shopify website or custom shopping cart solution for you business? Let us know, we would love to help out!