Bruton Stroube is a commercial photography studio that boasts the talents of three amazing photographers: Greg Stroube, Eric Johnson and Brandon Voges. The studio approached Boxing Clever with a simple request: "We need a new, fresh look to our website and we want to be able to update it ourselves".
After a couple of informational interviews a few things became clear.
1) The design of the site cannot overwhelm or distract from the photography.
2) The site had to feel alive and animated. Personal and experiential.
3) An intuitive user-interface would have to built for staff to maintain the site.
Form, meet function. Function, meet form. Now hug.
The site was built completely in Flash to take advantage of multimedia features (animation, sound, font control, etc) but typically this becomes problematic for maintainance because when it comes time to update the site you have to go back to the Flash files to make the changes. Clients don't want to learn new applications, they want to make updates and they want to do it easily. That's why we decided to make a dynamic content driven site where the flash files get populated on the fly with external content using XML to drive everything. That's a fancy way of saying the photos don't actually exist inside the Flash site, they're getting pulled into the site only when a user visits a particular page.
Another big part of the business is to assemble portfolios, or "lightboxes" for Bruton's existing and potential clients. Bruton builds the portfolios and provides a secure login for the client to go in and view their custom-made lightbox. Individual users that browse the site can also make their own lightboxes to essentially bookmark images that are relevant to their particular needs.
By using a proprietary Content Management System that we built, Bruton spends more time making breath-taking images and less time with everything else.
