Claymaker is a creative agency based in Jacksonville, Florida that specializes in creating stunning videos for businesses, non-profits, weddings, and corporations. We designed and developed their website so they could showcase their portfolio of work. Check out how we helped!
Designing a Portfolio Website
Claymaker’s website needed to sparkle (per their brand identity). They make videos and digital content with a whole lot of sparkle and pizazz (these are technical terms in the video industry ;P), which meant that their website had to have the same flavor.
While Claymaker’s website is not an e-commerce website, the site is still attempting to sell a product. Their website is used to capture leads and showcase their incredible work to win over clients. This meant that their website needed to do two things really well: (1) capture leads and (2) display their work. With these objectives in mind, we set out to design and build a portfolio website (here’s a fun intro article for the key elements of a portfolio website) that made it easy for clients to see their work and get in touch with them right away.
Tools for Creating Claymaker’s Portfolio
You will notice if you hop over to the ‘Work’ page on Claymaker’s website that we developed a filterable gallery so prospective clients could filter through their work by category (Branding, Film/TV, Entertainment). We created this gallery so that clients could easily find the type of work they were looking for without much searching.
Next, we created a custom post type called ‘Case Studies’ (if you have no idea what a custom post type is, that’s okay, check out this introductory article if you want to start geeking out a little) so we could create a custom template for generating portfolio items. In other words, we made it so that each portfolio items has a similar design, but completely customizable items. Each ‘Case Study’ has its own identity, but you can still tell that it all belongs together (which is one of the key objectives to solid brand representation).
(Sidenote: If you are working on a WordPress website yourself and need help with creating custom post types, here are two great plugins to get you started: (1) Custom Post Type UI let’s you natively generate CPTs in the backend without needing to know a line of code and (2) Advanced Custom Fields allows you to add all sorts of meta-data to your CPTs also without having to stress about code. Now, making it all look pretty and user-friendly is another story for another day. But, if you have a particular question, feel free to send us a message at our contact page.)
To help capture leads, we put contact forms in strategic areas all over the site. We also made an absurdly large footer with contact information so that when a user scrolls to the bottom of the page, they can easily call, text, or email Claymaker at the click of a button.
Feel free to head over to Claymaker’s website to explore their work and their portfolio website in action!