Shootfactory

I have been working with Shootfactory since their inception in 2006. Starting with the logo/brand design and moving onto their first website. I have seen Shootfactory grow over the years and have enjoyed every moment working with them right up to the present day. This is the third iteration of their website and the finest to date.

During 2014 we discussed a huge upgrade to the site, we had made use of WordPress to handle their blog and loved the simplicity and speed in adding content to the blog. So we set about working on can entirely new design, putting the locations at the forefront of the site in a clean design that really let the images sing.

We had always been hampered by small screens in the preceding years, but now with much larger displays and the inception of tablets and smartphones we really needed the site to look amazing across all devices.

In addition we had a stock of content which simply wasn’t practical to add to the site again, so during the early stages of the build I set about creating an export tool that not only exported the content, but also the images – and renamed those files at the same time to assist with SEO. In the run up to the new site Shootfactory spent almost 6 months adding descriptions to each image in the library so the export tool really paid off as we were able to export these details as well.

So what are we talking about in terms of what was exported? At the time of development we had over 20,000 images which had to be exported and imported into the new site. A total of 400 location pages to import and around 300 blog posts. All of which were checked by both myself and Shootfactory to ensure there were no errors.

At the time of writing we now have 777 locations available for viewing on the website, 498 blog posts and 35,569 images in total.

In my time developing websites using WordPress I have come across many comments that suggest WordPress is not capable of handling large websites, well, I think the numbers above speak for themselves as this is clearly not a small site.

Following the launch in 2016 we added a number of upgrades to the site, firstly an enhanced search utility allowing users to search the location database not only by keyword, but also to filter by tags and and by region using a vector map of London with each district being a clickable search filter.

In addition we developed a register your home function where prospective home owners can not only submit their home for inclusion into the site, but also upload their own images. We developed this into the site to reduce the workload of staff with quick acceptance or refusal of a new location, but to also keep their email under control – as you can no doubt understand receiving up to 10 new locations per day and the sets of emails containing images started to reduce their efficiency in processing these requests. In fact on a number of occasions we have had to disable this functionality because there hasn’t been the time to process the registrations.

To ensure all this hard work doesn’t go to waste we work collaboratively with an SEO expert on a monthly basis to ensure the site ranks extremely well in the search engines and this has proven invaluable over the years.