While Nick has been painting Jacks portrait I have taken a number of days to update our website and give it a bit of a spring clean. It wasn’t quite planned but once you start one job, it almost creates more work and develops into tweaking and changing things.
It really all started as last year when we applied to be put on ‘the map’ so to speak with Google and they not only listed us as a buisness, but gave us an official Google+ page. We had both already got Google+ pages but it didn’t seem to make sense to keep three. So we are now official with just this one here – Pet Portraits Google+
Once I had this page up and running I realised that it had an integrated You Tube account, so I deleted our old account and re-uploaded all of our videos so the You Tube link comes up in the our navigation. Clever!
I have deleted our twitter accounts as they weren’t working for us so we are on Google+, Facebook and You Tube. If any of our clients are on any of these social medias, you are more than welcome to connect with us and say hi. We have new social media buttons at the bottom of every page on our website.
I also realised that I had left our About us section index page half completed. I must have got interrupted when doing it last year and completely forgot! So I have taken some time to refresh the photos and create a lovely index page here – About us. I have plans to add more photos about our cottage garden renovations and the woodland area, I’m just waiting for the spring to arrive so we have some nicer weather to take photos.
Our website navigation has been updated too, along with a few of our pages, so I am hoping clients will be able to find things a little easier, and for everything to be much easier to understand. Its always good to receive feedback from clients about our sites so if anyone would like to email with general feedback they are more than welcome.
Perhaps one of the biggest changes this week is our Studio Diary. Those who are regular readers here may have seen our client list on the left hand side. What we didn’t realise however on some tablets and mobiles it wasn’t viewable unless you clicked a button to reveal it on the left. We are using a responsive theme and so it adapts to mobile and tablet screen sizes. This is great, although not so good when our client lists can’t be seen automatically. So we have moved our client lists to a static page on our website and now have the opportunity to use the full width of our blog. This has enabled me to redesign our blog images so clients can see more detail, more viewing angles of the portraits along with close ups using less space.
I have also made our studio diary subscription button more prominent on our website home page as our Studio Diary is one of the most important places for our clients to find and follow. We post everything here thats happening in the studio so please do feel free to sign up at any time. Our weekly roundup will arrive to your inbox on a Friday so you won’t miss a thing 
So now all of my updates are done, I must get back to my easel! More posts to follow though 
I’m going to make a concerted effort to make the videos a little more professional this year. I have absolutely no experience in filming or editing so its all about experimentation. I have done 8 so far and they have all been on the iPad and I will try doing the next one on our camera as the colour / sound might be improved. If you watch this one, you will hear my iMac restarting. I was doing updates in the background while filming and it restarted with lots of noise! “That wouldn’t do i thought”, so restarted a new take as i thought the iMac had finished, and half way through the filming it must have restarted again and you will hear the restart noise! Typical. So my plans for the next video is to use a different camera and adding the titles and credits again, I might even test out the tripod…..! Watch this space…a new career in the making ;D
