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New website design at www.ashleykaryl.com

Anybody who has been following this blog may remember a while ago that I had finally decided I should push ahead with a long overdue update of my site at http://www.ashleykaryl.com. The old site shown below was still functional and had a clean simple design but it had been some time since I had changed anything and I really felt like it needed a new look.

Original design at ashleykaryl.com

I have to say that my plans to get the site updated were not as smooth as I had hoped. Originally I had found a professional designer through one of those websites that is supposed to help you outsource jobs like this to specialist providers. The designer I eventually chose showed me a stunningly beautiful website that he claimed to have done for one of the biggest names in the world of hair and beauty. Everything about that site was achingly beautiful, so I immediately agreed to let him handle the job and told him that I wanted something very much along the same lines with the same sense of style and polish.

A few days later he returned with a draft idea for the design and I immediately started to have concerns. It looked like something that would have been popular with a computer geek in about in 1998. No Joke, it even had a pixelated computer style font that was hideous and I had to tell him that I really didn’t like it. The designer agreed to do something else and I pointed him back towards the example he had shown me plus a couple of other sites as an idea of what I was looking for.

Fast forward again to about a week later and he came back to me with something that was still pretty dull and uninspiring, but he assured me that changes could be made, so that the final website would look considerably more polished than the rather bland design he was showing me in the mockup. I agreed for him to move forward, though by now that small nagging voice was telling me that something was wrong here. Where had all the style gone?

Two days later he presented me with the site and it was hugely disappointing. None of the small points I had highlighted had been addressed and when I brought them up again he simply tried to brush them aside, while a couple of changes that he did make were very poorly implemented. The examples he had shown me before I gave him the job were all coded in neat CSS that validated perfectly, but this was all done with very old fashioned tables with a myriad of errors. Everything was all looking seriously bad from every angle.

Perhaps the most inexplicable point was that I kept asking for a site on a black background, but the design he was showing me had a white background and it seemed like I was talking to a brick wall when asking to have this changed.

It was becoming blindingly obvious by now that he had flat out lied about his work to get the job and it was fast becoming a very awkward situation. I showed the online design to a few others and everybody agreed it was remarkably ugly and that it would be a huge error to move ahead with the design. My old existing site was so much better that it would have been ridiculous to accept his proposal and I would have been better off with something automated from Lightroom or even one of those $25 flash template sites that you can buy.

After some consideration and given his clear lack of understanding or more likely ability to produce what had been agreed I reluctantly contacted him and said that I was very disappointed but I just couldn’t use his design and didn’t feel he was capable of of completing the project to the required standards.

I felt I had written this in a very polite and conciliatory fashion trying to explain my point, but he came back in a rather aggressive manner, never once expressing his regret that I wasn’t happy with the work or trying to find a remedy. I didn’t want to argue about it, so eventually I agreed to give him half the original amount and we left it at that, but I had lost time, money and had nothing to show for it. Now that I think about it, he hasn’t even sent me a receipt for the payment that I gave him, so I think I have learned here that in future I won’t be hiring any designers unless I can see they produce good work and that they come recommended by somebody I know and trust who can vouch for their abilities.

I was discussing the whole debacle with a friend of mine in London who is also a photographer. He very kindly said he would design a fresh site for me, which is the one I am using now. I feel it has a very intuitive navigation and a design that engages, but don’t upstage my work.

This is exactly what a professional photographer’s site should be if they want to effectively communicate what their work is all about. I am also very glad that I don’t have one of those sites created as a template for photographers where they pay a monthly fee. There is nothing seriously wrong with those sites in most cases, but who wants a design that looks exactly the same as hundreds of other photographers?

Obviously I could have tried myself, but it’s been years since I’ve done any regular web work and I know it would never really be up to scratch on a technical level, so it was much appreciated to have somebody capable who was prepared to produce something modern with the kind of simple elegance that I was looking for.

The site took longer to finish than either of us had imagined, but he used this as an opportunity to try out a few ideas for his own purposes. Not everything is 100% finished even now, since I intend to add some newer images in the near future when I have them ready and there are a few other minor tweaks to be added, but for the time being though I am extremely happy with the result and feel it does the images far more justice than the old site.