Sometimes you get a client that you want to invent new projects for, just so that you can keep working together. That has been the case for me, working with Karen Hutton: Photographer. Light-Bender. Purveyor of Awesomeness. (All true, by the way.) I’ve so enjoyed working with her but, in our first chat, I could immediately see the big issue that was running through Karen’s online presence: She’s a multi-talented woman, and that had translated into multiple websites. Multiple websites had served her really well but she was ready for a more polished approach. Also, because she’s becoming a sought after speaker and photographer, her business model had been making a switch from selling her talents, to selling her.
Information Architecture
The first thing Karen and I had to do was roll up our sleeves and sort out the information architecture of her site. (Not sure what that is? Check out this post of yore.) Usually, the information architecture meeting, is part of my hour-long launch meeting, right at the beginning of my work with a client. We ended up breaking Karen’s launch/information architecture meeting into two one-hour meetings. We had a lot to cover! It was super important for us to figure out what pages she actually needed on the site. The pages that we wanted to include depended heavily on Karen’s new way of selling her talents because we wanted to make the website as easy to use for the target audience. In order to have an easy-to-use website, you have to have a clear message and business plan.
Karen was moving more into her passion for photography, so we wanted the site to feature her photography prominently. Originally, Karen had a separate website for her photography, voiceover and blog. We combined the three sites into the new site and added a speaking page. That way, users going to her site will easily find what they were initially looking for, and may even discover one of Karen’s talents they didn’t know about.
The New Site
After Karen and I worked together to create an easily manageable information architecture, the site went off to design with Natasha Lakos. Once Natasha finished up the design, I built out the site with all of the pages that Karen and I originally decided on.
The result is a gorgeous website that is easy to get around and update. Karen now only has this site to update (and her Smugmug galleries), instead of maintaining three sites. It’s faster and cleaner for her, and much easier for her growing audience to find her. The result will be more audience interaction, more social media shares and hopefully more work for Karen!
You can check out Karen’s new site here. Don’t miss her Instagram feed. It’s f*#&ing gorgeous.
Kate Moore Hermes 