It has been a good few years since Aasulv Wolf Austad, FNF, edited his website. He added clips to his portfolio of narrative, commercial and music video work on a regular basis, without changing the look and other features on his overall site. 

But as time wore on, he said that the site was looking a bit outdated, and some prospective collaborators said that the mobile version wasn't the user-friendliest. Furthermore, he wanted badly to remove some clips and add others, and he wanted the site to be better optimized overall so that he would be more easily found in searches. 

In other words, he wanted a redesign. 

Full disclosure: Aasulv is my husband. 

Now that I have that out of the way, I'll share just a few things about this site - and for that matter, all photographers' and cinematographers' websites. Generally speaking the requirements for these sites are: 

- They need to load quickly no matter the device or browser

- They need to be user-friendly. As in, a toddler should be able to click on a video or image and easily view it and enjoy it. 

- The About page needs to give visitors a clear idea of who this individual is and what it's like to work with them. These are creative professionals who are not very talkative. That's why they're behind the camera! So the About page really has to add a layer of storytelling that helps the visitor feel a connection with the cinematographer. 

- The overall layout needs to be clean, easy on the eye, minimalist, and let the work do the talking. 

I joke that my husband is easily my most difficult client. But the requirements for building and designing his website - as simple as they may seem - are pretty challenging. We had to experiment a  little with video compression, and because Wolf wanted to self-host all clips, we had to put the site through some vigorous testing to make sure that he had enough disk space and bandwidth and all that good stuff so the site would perform as it needs to. Furthermore, I created two versions of the site - a mobile and a larger - so that people using phones to view his work would have no trouble with that. 

It's my personal opinion, of course, but sites like this are best viewed on desktops. 

This site was created in Rapidweaver, with Foundation 6 as the base code, and Stacks 5 to create the page designs. 

Without further ado, here's the Before and After of Cinematographer Aasulv Wolf Austad's website. 

To view the new website, please visit WolfAustad.com

If you have any questions or comments about this, please let me know! 

And if you're a Cinematographer looking to redesign your website, I'd love to talk to you about that. Just contact me for a Web Clarity call. It's free, and we'll discuss what's working, what's not, what you need and the first step you need to take to get a website that helps you show off your work, gets you more gigs and raises your profile. 

Thanks for your time. I truly appreciate it.