Versatile Photography

The Challange

The first challenge was to take their existing branding and create a brochure/marketing website to promote their services and case studies. Without a destination to showcase their work or a means of making contact for hire, the portal would be half as beneficial for the Versatile team.

The client photography and video gallery was the cherry on top. To create a secure area that would improve the customer’s journey and experience. And while there are off-the-shelf solutions on the market, Versatile wanted one that was tailored and integrated with their brand, which required a bespoke system.

The Solution

With the brochure site being built on WordPress, we did consider the same approach for the portal but soon realised the limitations this would create for us and Versatile with such large uploads and communications with the client. Instead, we looked at Laravel for the solution using a technology stack that included:

• Laravel
• Laravel Horizon to process a large number of background jobs
• Laravel’s scheduler to send expiry notifications at dynamic intervals
• Twilio SMS to deliver SMS notifications
• Mailgun to increase the safe deliverability of email notifications

In a single session, the portal allows Versatile to create a customer account and galleries for large videos and photos for the client to view and download. Versatile can communicate with the client when a project is updated and offer individual and bulk downloads of the original files.

Uploads and Downloads

For both the Versatile team and the client, we wanted to ensure that the user experience was simple and easy to use. Both the administrator and client screens are very similar, which creates a familiar user experience for each user type. We simplified the process of uploading large files, video files that can be 10’s of GBs, and made is as simple for the client to access, find, and download their event imagery and videos.

Uploads

• Images and videos uploaded to S3 compatible storage on Digital Ocean
• Makes use of Digital Ocean Spaces CDN for delivering images and videos
• Once uploaded, video processing happens in a background job–because processing large video files can take hours
• Media bulk upload keeps the order of the files they are dragged in by
• Thumbnails for images and videos are processed in a background job

Downloads

• Each image or video can be downloaded separately
• All images can be downloaded in bulk (ZIP file)

Notifications

The client portal provides unique notification types for both the Versatile team and for the client. Each notification alerts admin users and clients of tasks completed, errors, and updates to a project using Laravel’s built-in notifications system.

Admin Notifications.

1. Email notification when the project expired
2. Email notification when project viewed by client
3. Email notification when bulk image upload completes/fails
4. Email notification when large videos have finished uploading and processing

Client Notifications:

1. Email notification of project updates
2. SMS notifications of project updates
3. Email notification before a project expires 7/3/1 days
4. Email notification after it expires

To ensure deliverability, we integrated Mailgun via their API to send and track emails, guaranteeing an average delivery rate of 97.4%, beating the industry average of 85%.

Along with email notifications, clients of the portal also receive SMS notifications, providing a mobile number is added for the client. This was integrated using Twilio’s Programmable Messaging API.

Brochure Website

In addition to the bespoke client photo gallery, we developed a brochure website to promote Versatile’s work and services, with the primary goal of converting visitors into clients. Once onboard, Versatile can open a personal account on the portal for the client to view photography and videos from their event.

To effectively showcase Versatile Photography and its work, we designed a website that reflected the culture of the clients’ weddings and displayed large format imagery and looping videos in the headers to capture the audience’s imaginations and to sell in the dream.

Like almost all of our websites, the brochure website is built using WordPress, which has an intuitive page builder tool that allows Versatile to create visually stunning pages and case studies optimised for SEO and page speed.