Case Study: PhotographyTips.com

Destined to be the ultimate photographer's resource - the place any photographer comes to for information regardless of the subject and level of expertise, PhotographyTips.com boasts literally hundreds of pages of tips, techniques and other photography information -- and around 700,000 page views per month. With its carefully-sorted categories and powerful search engine, anyone with an interest in photography will have no trouble spending hours soaking in the words of wisdom and outstanding illustrations on PhotographyTips.com.

It took a tremendous amount of effort for Dan McCormick to create all this written and photographic content. But he didn't have to learn web design or spend untold thousands on web development.

McCormick is the first to admit that he's not a technical expert, but he finds managing his site with WebOnTheFly to be very simple:

"What is remarkable about the creation of our PhotographyTips.com web site is that we, as owners, were able to do all the uploading of information and images ourselves through our browser, thanks to the user-friendly design of the WebOnTheFly database program that powers the web site. We were able to control how the information is displayed through various design templates, all in a totally live environment. We could see how things would look to viewers as we were making the additions and changes. We could add links where we thought they were important. We controlled image cutlines, image sizes, keywords, headings - everything. In effect, we were completely in charge of our own web site's content, appearance and navigation, and still are. Thanks to WebOnTheFly, it is easy and it's even fun."

As a photographer, McCormick has a very artistic eye, but he needed design help to bring his web vision to reality. That's where Laurie McConnell of Bad Dog Design stepped in. She was able to create the look that Dan envisioned and incorporate some WebOnTheFly features to organize his trove of content so visitors can easily find what they're looking for.

WebOnTheFly enables designers like McConnell to focus their creativity on strategy and design rather than minor text revisions.

PhotographyTips.com makes extensive use of WebOnTheFly's "meta categories" to organize tips by topic. This allows McCormick to create a new tip, choose several appropriate topics and let WebOnTheFly automatically insert links to the page from those topical areas.

The site also has a powerful search engine that scans all the text on the site and shows the results ranked in order of relevance, with scores displayed.

Of course, Dan McCormick has much more in mind for his site, including some eCommerce. And we look forward to helping him make that happen.