Chris Mcintosh - Web Design | Photography | Videography

chris

I Fell For Pretty Theme Syndrome

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I did it. I allowed myself to fall into one of the traps I warn my customers against. I fell for pretty theme syndrome.

Let me break it down – what pretty theme syndrome is, and why its bad.

When you build a website you build it on a server with software and a bunch of techy mumbo jumbo you likely don’t care to have that much detail about. Here’s the the thing to focus on – your website should have clean code that is easily understandable by search engines like Google.

My website often gets the backburner, because I’m always focusing on customer projects. So instead of coding my own website when I needed a refresh, I went out and found a trendy theme. The theme looked really cool and was the design of my website for the past several months.

While my website looked cool, I went in to check on the details and discovered that when I “popped the hood” of that theme the code was very messy. My search results were plummeting and the wrong information was getting pulled through when someone searched for keywords related to my business or even directly for my name.

Now I have to do a bit of cleanup work. I’ve already begun by putting up a new theme I wrote but now I need to go in an tweak everything to get myself back on the right track.

Sometimes its just best to listen to your own advice and not get lazy.

Ross & Hannah’s Wedding Video

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I had the pleasure of hanging out with Ross and Hannah for their big day this past summer. Here’s some of their big day. It was a hot summer Delaware wedding and I was thrilled to be able to video it!

CrossfitSBY Videography

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I got to do some video stories for CrossfitSBY. We had two main objectives.

  • Fill up their 9am class (which is a perfect entry point for stay at home moms to join their membership).
  • Show off some of the abilities and improvements that comes along with committing to Crossfit for an extended period of time.

Most of the cinematic shots were captured using a gimbal and a few were hand held. We wanted emphasize their kid friendly environment. I can attest to that and you can see the kids running around in some of the shots. It truly is a kid friendly environment.

I’m thrilled to be able to announce these videos and I’m super happy with the way they come out.

National Folk Festival Photography 2018

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I was commissioned by the City of Salisbury to photograph on their behalf during the 2018 Folk Festival. They primarily wanted images of people enjoying themselves and the vendors around downtown.  I was also able to provide a few shots of some of the performances. Here are all of my favorite images from the festival this year!

  • National Folk Festival 2018 Smiling Volunteer - Chris Mcintosh
  • National Folk Festival 2018 Dancing Kids - Chris Mcintosh
  • Kid dancing at the 2018 National Folk Festival - Picture By Chris Mcintosh
  • The Red Trouser guys doing a street performance at the National Folk Festival 2018
  • Rah'zel the beat boxer at the National Folk Festival 2018 in Salisbury Maryland - Picture by Chris Mcintosh
  • Grand Marshal of the Treme Brass Brand 2018 National Folk Festival Salisbury MD
  • Treme Brass Brand on Mill Street in Salisbury MD during the National Folk Festival 2018
  • Pastor Mark Bunting hanging out at the National Folk Festival 2018
  • Crowd shot of opening at 2018 National Folk Festival led by Treme Brass Brand

City of Salisbury Website Redesign

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As an entity grows, their website should grow with them. The City of Salisbury’s website hadn’t seen a redesign since early 2012. The City leadership mentioned that the website was not a primary focus for them. Until they put out an RFP in August of 2016.

The City of Salisbury needs a website that reflects our commitment to transparency in city government.

Jacob Day – Mayor (2016)

A total of 26 businesses responded to the RFP. I was ecstatic to find out in early September that my bid won. Soon we started into the early consultation and planning phase, with a whiteboard session. Our goal was to synthesize both the assets and challenges down to a sitemap. After we agreed on a sitemap, I was able to begin working on prototype designs.

Developing a prototype

The prototype needed to carefully considered the needs of 11 very different city departments. There was a lot of legacy content that I had to preserve. This legacy content was on three different websites but needed to be joined into this one new website.

After considering all of the possible users and use cases of this website I knew it had to be extremely flexible. My design also needed to rigid in all the right places. Navigation needed to be extremely simple, but despite all the flexibility it all needed to look and feel very cohesive.

I decided to implement a block layout for this website. The block layout would afford the site two benefits. Blocks allow for great amount of flexibility, allowing the city to place sections where they are needed. Block layouts also mean information may only be presented in a handful of different arrangements.

After presenting the prototype, the Mayor’s office absolutely loved it.

Design & Development

They asked for very minor tweaks and I got to work solving some of the higher level challenges. I began putting together as many blocks as I possibly could. I designed blocks that could display a single video or video gallery. The city needed a way to present events, so I designed a block for events.These blocks allow almost any kind of data to be presented on any page.

I decided to use a slide out menu due to the possibility of top level navigation items growing beyond 5-7 pages. This slide out menu ended up being one of the best possible decisions I could have made. The menu works excellently on mobile and desktop browsers.

I also gave the city the option of featuring specific menu items outside of the menu toggle. You can see many of the pages the city would like to guide you to being featured above like Report an Issue, Citizen Services, and pay a bill. We wanted to reduce the number of clicks a user would need to get to where they are going. That sitemap from early on in the project really helped make this part of design clearcut.

In chase of this goal of reducing navigational clicks, I also implemented a predictive search box.

After presenting the polished design roughly three and a half months later. I was given the go ahead to pull in legacy content and get it on a server.

Making Performance First Priority

Now that we had the website out on the internet and in the wild, it was time to make sure that it was performant. I implemented lazy loading of images and videos, as well as caching both in the browser and at the server level.

Also some tools were installed to reduce the size of assets uploaded by city employees.

For a site of this size we came away with some pretty impressive performance numbers in the page load time. The home page is an image heavy page with lots of assets and blocks being loaded. Both Twitter and Instagram APIs are being hit in addition to Youtube on this page. This page still loads in well under a second regularly.

Training and Education

Now that we had all the development behind us it was time to make sure the City had the knowledge of how to use their website, this was the most vital part of the whole process. I spent a little over a full work week training members from each city department how post to the website and update their own department pages. We started with classes of three departments at a time sending their employees. After training every department I began one on ones for employees who didn’t pick it up the first time.

All together I trained 60+ city employees how to run the city website.

The site had to be simple to update and easy to train so that the I.T. Department wouldn’t get bogged down make content changes on the website. Each department got their own logins and only has permissions and abilities to change their own content. This makes the information of each department able to move much quicker than submitting a change to the infrastructure team and waiting for them to implement.

After everybody was sufficiently trained each department got to work updating their pages.

Review & Launch

The departments were given deadlines by the Mayor’s Office and we began the review process making sure each rabbit hole had answers, each contact point had a form and at least one recipient. After all this work was done I was very proud to announce the new website with the city.

Check out the video below of the announcement of the site.

Our amazing new website is LIVE!!

Posted by Jacob Day on Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Check out this article about the website launch in the Salisbury Independent!

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