Salt Paper Studio

Upping the Game for a Brand on the Move

If you’ve met Courtney Swift-Copeland then you understand why her business, Salt Paper Studio is ascending rapidly into the stratosphere. Swift-Copeland’s discerning eye for detail has captured the attention of major brands like Krispy-Kreme Doughnuts among others. How does a major international brand like Krispy Kreme notice you when you’re not located in New York or LA, but Rock Hill, South Carolina? You have to be supremely talented at what you do, and Courtney is one of the best in the business today for product photography, production, and art direction.

Courtney approached us for a new website (we had been managing her Google Ads campaigns), to improve the digital image of her brand. Her previous SquareSpace site fit the bill when her company was an up-and-coming start-up, but now, with a more robust clientele, Courtney needed a customized solution that better showcased her photography and professionalism.

We were up for the challenge and knew we had to deliver something special to meet the eye and satisfaction of a true creative who pays attention to every detail.

Courtney wanted very little in the way of text as to let her photography do the talking. Our job was to weave in just enough text to satisfy the web crawlers of Google so that more people could discover and lay eyes on the amazing images being created by Salt Paper Studio every month.

With our mission, we got to work.

Listening and Understanding

The baseline for any successful project begins with listening and lots of note-taking. Salt Paper Studio is specialized and works within a world we didn’t know too much about. As in every subject, there is nuance and the only way to learn it is to do research, ask questions and you guessed it… do a lot of listening.

Some of the requirements for this project included:

• the ability to customize photo layouts to best accommodate photography of various sizes
• having the option to insert GIFs and videos within the portfolio galleries
• having minimal scroll on the home page without losing all opportunity for optimization
• ensuring the end-user could quickly find the various services and portfolios being displayed
• using parallax to animate photography on the scroll (the pacing of the animations was very specific)
• utilize secondary navigation within the portfolio
• ensuring the brand felt congruent to the types of clients Salt Paper Studio was trying to attract
• optimization for a great mobile and tablet experience

Proud of This Work

Through the course of this project we tested and tested… and tested… and tested countless layouts to ensure that this photo-rich website was pleasing to Courtney and her entire team. If our group has a special talent, it’s attention to detail and that was what ultimately won the day. Internally, we are so proud of the work done to make this project a great success. Since launch, we have seen bounce rates decrease and time spent on the website navigating through the incredible photography, increase. With an increase in site traffic and engagement, the leads generated have brought in some heavy-hitter clients for this incredible studio led by its dynamic leader.

We have so much gratitude for the trust Courtney put in our team and are happy to say that she continues to be a client of ours today.