Matthew Williams-Ellis
Matthew is a London-based photographer and filmmaker, specialising in the travel and leisure industry. His personal work has received recognition in Travel Photographer of the Year and Wildlife Photographer of the Year on numerous occasions. Commercial clients include the likes of Talisker Whisky, Visit Wales, Stena Line and Nikon.
Chris has created a beautiful, highly-functional website that does everything we discussed at the start of the project, and more things that I simply didn’t think were going to be possible! From the initial chat, he has always been enthusiastic, knowledgeable and helpful, and has considered not just the look of the website but also the ease of use for myself on the back end too. I cannot recommend Chris highly enough!Matthew Williams-Ellis
Objectives
Matthew's previous WordPress based website was slow to load and used a theme which didn't ideally fit his needs. The navigation didn't clearly lay out all of the areas of his business and visually it felt quite generic.
Throughout the design process we focused on showcasing Matthew's photographs front and centre, whilst incorporating subtle flourishes such as vertical text to make the site feel modern and polished.
Performance
It was a priority that the site is fast to load, whilst also supporting galleries with upwards of 40 high resolution images per page. All images are loaded via a content delivery network (CDN) and a blurred preview is shown initially so that the user doesn't see any image pop-in as they load. Lazy loading makes image loading almost imperceptible to the user.
