1. Keep the site elegant
2. integrate a slideshow feature on the landing page
3. integrate a Flash gallery browser
4. provide a way to automatically update his photo galleries.

I decided to choose the WordPress platform because I was impressed with the ease of implementation and breadth of features for this framework. I was pretty sure I would be able to exceed the customer’s expectations by providing additional features with minimum development time.

One example of this is the Shadowbox JS plug-in, enabling visually engaging photo galleries that are easily customizable. See it in action on the site: http://www.photo-ess.com/blog/?page_id=42

I convinced Photo Essence that including a blog would be a great way to get higher rankings on search engines. As the site accumulates more and more content, that content is getting indexed by search engines, and thus, more and more views by potential customers. Blogging is so easy now and there are many applications out there to write and publish blogs including Microsoft Word 2007, Microsoft Live Writer, or even e-mail to post a blog.

Lastly, I developed tools to enable the client to quickly and easily update galleries with one or two mouse clicks. I wrote a small C# application which uses Photoshop APIs (OK, this is getting technical…) to take his high-resolution photographs and resize them, create thumbnail images in a specific size used in the WordPress photo galleries, save them in .jpg format, and finally, FTP the finished pictures to photo-ess.com. I’m going to write another blog soon on the C# application and PhotoShop scripting features. It’s really pretty awesome.

Below are some screenshots, but please visit the live site: www.photo-ess.com.

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