Katherine Cummings Web Site Development

A clean, neutral web design to showcase the art

With several new exhibitions, fine art photographer Katherine Cummings needed to update her site. Unfortunately, it had been built in Flash by a classmate required expensive designer services each time she needed to make changes. Her budget wouldn’t even cover one round of updates! We moved her to WordPress, created a custom template and added a Gallery module that gave her the same look-and-feel of her previous gallery but allowed her to make her own changes once she was trained — all within an artist’s budget.

Everything in the design was kept within a narrow tonal range matching her natural artistic style while providing a neutral visual surface for her images. She had liked the sparse, almost-Zen simplicity of her previous design but needed something that could handle the new directions her work was taking. By reducing the contrast of even the text, the images predominate.

Updating content on her web site is now easy for her.

Cummings wanted to do add new collections of images as she created new shows, however, she did not want to have to learn a lot of technical methods and programs. Her technical interests are in photographic development, not the web. Yet she wanted to also keep the structured, grid-system presentation of her first web site and exhibition. After researching various solutions and rejecting most as too complex to meet the goals, a modified WPPA plugin for WordPress gave her what she wanted and needed.

Using the WPPA plugin for WordPress allows Cummings to easily add new exhibition galleries.

Preliminary discussion and project analysis made it clear that on this initial phase of developing her web presence, the best use of Cummings meager budget would be template design and creating an acceptable gallery solution. WordPress gave her the back-end program she could afford (including a $25 donation to the WPPA plugin developer) while Carolyn E. Cooper Communications focused on installation on her current hosting system, template design and gallery code hacks. After a bit of training at a Seattle Barnes & Noble cafe, Katherine Cummings’ site was picture perfect for under $500 (not including hosting and domain name).