I needed to briefly review another photographer’s website for a class assignment, so I looked at St. Louis photographer (and fellow Mizzou alum) Sarah Conard’s professional site. She uses a simple, clean flash interface to introduce her site with a looping 5-picture slideshow featuring images that represent her work in sports, music, food, news and feature photography.
The user can easily exit this short presentation at any time by clicking a simple list of links to the left of the page. These links lead to galleries and slideshows for those same categories, combining news and feature in to one genre called “Life” and adding options to also peruse portraits, audio slideshows and recent work. Visitors can also see biographical and resume information for Conard and may link to a separate PhotoShelter site to purchase and license images. The images selected for display here are strong and do a good job of showcasing the versatility of this photographer.
The site appears to use a CSS/Flash template stored on a server named lightgalleries.net , but there isn’t a publically accessible website with that name, so I couldn’t get much more information than that. It’s very user friendly and simple to navigate, but it doesn’t seem to leave any room to showcase the photographer’s image or personality. Or if it does, this particular photographer has not chose to do so. In addition to rendering her someone anonymous, the limited about of text within the site may also hurt Conard's searchability. Including a link to an integrated blog on that left side might help her include more searchable information in a way that doesn't interfere with the clean, efficient look of the site.