Developing My Own Motorsport Website.

As I am about to graduate and go out into the real world to find work as a motorsport photographer. I feel that it is of huge importance to have my own website.

This will allow me to expand my reach much further than just meeting people in person. 

Using the various social media systems such as Linked In, Twitter and Facebook, combined with having a selection of my best work in an online portfolio or website, will allow me to reach a much broader audience, and thus, will allow me a better chance of making contact with someone who would like to commission me to work for them.

As I am about to finish my degree, my funding at the moment is really tight.

If I could afford to, I would definitely have a bespoke website designed to showcase the best of my work.

Due to my budget restrictions at the moment, I want to design my own website using a free online website-builder.

A lot of my friends who study graphic and interior design have all recommended a free website builder called Wix.

I have decided to use this site to develop my own website for free from a pre-designed template.

Fig-1.

Figure 1. The Wix.com homepage.

Fig-2.

Figure 2. There is a huge list of free templates relative to your business type.

Fig-3.

Figure 3. The photography templates. there are 36 different templates just for photography alone.

They are all animated in different ways. Some are full-screeen, some just have small images on their home-page.

Some of the templates are incredibly colourful and others plain.

They are all infinitely customisable which I think is a great aspect of this site.

Fig-4.

Afte spending several hours looking through all of the different photography website templates, I have decided to use this one called online photographer as my starting template.

It is really simple in it's appearance with black-text on a white background.

The image in the middle can be a solitary image or the page can be changed to show a series of images with pre-defined transitions.

Based on my research of the Darren Heath website. I intend to invert the colours of this website to give white text on a black background.

It is also possible to alter the font of the different text within the screen and I also intend to experiment with this to see how much flexibility I can have in the design of my site using Wix.

Fig-5.

After some brief experimentation, it is possible as can be seen in figure 5 to adjust the fonts a sizes of the different text elements within the page.

After making a lot of adjustments to the initial template in Figure-4, I have developed this new site.

I have made the following changes to get to this new layout.

• Changed the background to black.
• Replaced the single image on the home-page with a gallery of images that transitions between images automatically every 3 seconds.
• Changed the title to Richard Meftah - Motorsports Photography.
• Changed the fonts of the website title.
• The Main title uses the IMPACT font and the sub-heading uses the OPEN SANS font.
• I have made 5 tabs at the top of the screen for the different pages of my website.
• These tabs are:

1. Home.
2. Motorbike Racing.
3. Car Racing.
4. People.
5. About Me.
6. Contact.

• On each of these tabs, I have placed a key-image from that selection of work on the left side of the page with a short written description underneath it.
• On the right side of the page is a grid of images, clicking on any of these images opens them up to a much larger size and the viewer can the use a cursor either side of this image to scroll through the images in either direction.

Fig-6.

Homepage.

Fig-7.

Motorbike Racing

Fig-8.

Car Racing.

Fig-9.

People.

Fig-10.

Contact.

Figures 6 to 10 above show the 6 different pages of my motorsports photography website.

On my contact page above in Figure 10, I have used one of the clever functions of the Wix website builder to create a form to send me an email with an enquiry. I have tested it and it worked perfectly the first time that I tried it.

It is now possible to contact me by email by simply completing this form.

I have also tried adding a Facebook ''Like'' button and a Twitter ''Follow'' button.

These were all very easy to set up using the ''Add Social Links'' tool. as can be seen in Figure 11 below.

Fig-11.

When I published my site however, I found these 2 links to be a little distracting.

I need to find a better layout for them on the screen.

I have temporarily removed the from my site but they are definitely useful tools and will pit them back in when iI can find a more suitable layout for them.

After putting this layout together, I realised that I did not like the grid-structure on every page. 

I feel that it works ok on my people page so I have decided to keep that format.

I like the way that it looks in it's actual grid-format as in Figures 7,8 and 9 but when I click onto an image to expand it, the transition was really jerky and it had a really heavy white border that I was not able to remove in any of the settings.

This grid also detracted from my initial idea of having the images as big as possible on screen.

I elected to redesign the pages using a slideshow page instead.

I have designated some basic controls to the slideshow window that will allow the site-user to play and pause the slideshow as well as navigating backward and forwards.

I have given it a default setting to automatically play through the images with a transition every 3 seconds.

Fig 12.

Fig 13.

Fig 14.

Figures 12, 13 and 14 show my newly revised page layout that I am now really happy with.

It has taken me a huge amount of work to get to this stage.

Learning to use the Wix website builder was initially very difficult indeed but once I understood how it works, I am now confident in it's use and now intend to continue to develop a full-series of mini-sites that will cover the full spectrum of my photographic practice.