Pilu García

A gift

Pilu García is the portfolio website of a professional photographer. The project was a gift I wanted to give her to help with her career, so go take a look: she’s really good. Plus, I appear in one of the collections :P

From the start, the idea was that she could update the website herself as she did new shoots and wanted to show them to the world, without depending on anyone.

Technology

The website is built with Astro in standalone mode and uses Strapi as a headless CMS. The whole site is configured from Strapi: the photos on the home page, the text and photo on the “about” page and, of course, the photo collections.

Design: fashion and photography

Before designing, I looked at other photographers’ websites to see if there was a trend in how they showcase their work or anything common I should take into account. To my surprise, the best-known photographers have contact websites, with very few photos and nothing that showed their shoots.

Since I didn’t find any clear reference, I decided to go my own way. The design is based on clothing stores like Zara and similar aesthetics such as Zara Home. She’s passionate about fashion, so I thought it would be nice to combine that aesthetic with her calling: photography.

Self-managed galleries

The main focus was making sure she could publish her galleries on her own. To do that, I built everything she needed in Strapi:

• Galleries: creating and publishing photo collections.
• Automatic compression: photos are compressed for the web when uploaded, so they don’t affect performance.
• Display modes: different ways of presenting the photos in each gallery, to add an extra touch to what she wants to convey.
• Focal point: choosing the focal point of each image, so the framing is right at any size.
• Videos: even though it’s a photography website, videos can be published too. You can see them in the Un verano más sano collection.

SEO

Besides taking care of how the galleries look, I wanted to go deep into SEO, and that was one of the reasons for choosing Astro. Even in standalone mode, the HTML is rendered on the server, so crawlers can index it without any problems.

SEO is present across the whole website: when a new gallery is published, its metadata is generated automatically thanks to Astro and the logic I built for it.

Performance

Even though media files are already compressed when uploaded, the whole website goes through Cloudflare to take advantage of its CDN and serve content as fast as possible.

Analytics

To track the website’s traffic I use Umami, an alternative to Google Analytics that complies with EU regulations. It’s set up in non-intrusive mode, so there’s no need to show any notices to visitors. On top of that, if the user’s browser says they don’t want to be tracked, Umami doesn’t run.

This lets her see which collections catch people’s attention the most, where her visitors come from, and so on. And the part I like the most: it’s self-hosted! :D

Go take a look

Check out pilugarcia.com, and if you need a professional photo shoot, you know who to contact!

*click* [◉¯]