Digital SLR Photography Magazine

Digital SLR Photography magazine caters to photographers of all experience levels and is concerned largely with improving the quality of photographs through advice and tutorials. The client involved me in the redesign of their website comprising new layout, a more defined user-flow and a more up to date design that placed greater emphasis on the quality of the photography it features.

I set out to design a layout with a larger visual impact, achieved firstly by introducing photographic backdrops into the core page design and a greatly revised "See Inside" feature, made more dynamic and responsive. I also wanted to introduce the customer funnel much earlier in the user's journey through the site, so I allocated a portion of the homepage real-estate to the three tiers of subscription offers available for purchasing the magazine. This move was made in response to direct user feedback pertaining to the current website design; a significant portion of users felt they got lost during the conversion process owing to the poor layout and distracting placement of unrelated sales messaging. My design sought to correct this, as well as improve overall navigation with a more comprehensive menu system and other navigational markers to help signpost traffic.

The natural world is a big draw for the audience of Digital SLR Photography and spring time offers the most favourable conditions in the UK for budding photographers to go out and capture imagery of it. That was the rationale behind the client's Spring into Photography campaign which I was invited to work on. The campaign had multiple objectives. Predominantly it sought to increase customers subscribing to its magazine, but beyond that it wanted to generate buzz among its satellite audiences with a view to nudge them further along the road to conversion. The client's Facebook fan page was the biggest of these audiences so in addition to online digital banners I designed, marketing emails I created and various print-based marketing, a competition for the social network platform was devised.

I needed to both design and build the competition component, which meant getting to grips with Facebook's own Software Development Kit (SDK). To keep the competition exclusive to fans of the client's page I had to code the entry form to sit behind a "like-gate", meaning that a user must first agree to accept all published content from Digital SLR Photography in their own personal Facebook newsfeed before they could enter. Once past the gate, messages prompting page subscription were replaced with the actual entry form, which I needed to build and test with validation in the usual way.

Overall the project was a great exercise in working with third party code integration as well as back end planning and development. Subsequent debriefing has told me that the campaign was quite a success and that both magazine subscriptions and Facebook engagements were up as a result.

Digital SLR Photography regularly communicate with their subscription base and other data lists via email marketing to improve both engagement and conversion. I have been briefed to design, code, and test responsive email designs for such client communications on a number of occasions.

Whilst creating these emails I've always made a point of using high-impact visual photography from the client's central library as part of their design, to better enforce the principles of the magazine and boost the overall appeal to the reader. Whilst doing this ensures a more attractive design over a typical email template, it also introduces challenges with regards to managing responsive design is respected; sustaining controlled behaviour of multiple images as page furniture in an ever-changing canvas is no simple feat. Fortunately I've now produced enough of these emails for the client that I have a plethora of tricks and strategies at my disposal that guarantee reliable and enticing results.