Along with the photography taking up a ton of my time, something else has also been taking my time. I needed a website to which I would be able to guide new potential clients. Since I’m a designer I had a specific idea of what my site should look like and finding a template and plugging my images in didn’t really appeal to me. I took it as a challenge to learn to build my own website. In the past I’ve done simple sliced up websites, but those were impossible to update without redoing the whole site. So they’d get neglected and stale.

One of the reasons I needed this website was all of these new clients I was meeting knew nothing about me. It’s a lot of trust to put in someone who is photographing you without knowing anything about their work. After a week or so of solid researching, learning, designing, and building I now have photo.mattshumate.com up and running.

As with anything new, it’s not perfect yet. Since publishing, I’ve already found a few little things I need to tweak. I still need to add the VIP area which will allow clients to log in with their password and review their proofs. It’s close but not there yet. I also still need to update the look of this page and build my design website.

I have however updated the look of the splash page to match the look of the photography site a little closer.

**Special bonus points to anyone who can decipher the background pattern (It’s not that hard).**

Well then. Now what?

Please let me know what you think.

Should you be honest? Brutally.

Critique? Yup. It’s how we learn and get better.

Should you give me suggestions about the website as well as my photography? Absolutely.

Should you tell me what you like about it too? Please do.

Should you ask questions? If you do, I’ll answer.

Most of all, just leave a comment to let me know you’ve seen it—either here or through the contact page of photo.mattshumate.com

Thanks for reading.

-matt.