Photler is Crafton's first SaaS start-up. The project came into existence because of the agency’s owner initiative – Piotr Kulczycki, who has a passion for photography and travel. The service’s goal is to encourage travel photographers to co-create a collection of photos from all over the world and at the same time provide them with a tool to design their own photography portfolio website.
The biggest challenge along the way was to build the website creator, which enables users to manage their own pages in a really intuitive way. The graphic design of the site itself, as well as portfolio templates, required lots of user testing and reiteration to ensure a flawless experience.
We started the design process with market research, which allowed us to define the needs and preferences of the travel photographers’ community. The analysis included real usability tests, from visitors of the website www.worldinmylens.com. Piotr Kulczycki website has aroused delight and genuine interest among travellers willing to build a similar web page for years.
The results of the analysis helped us to determine our target audience’s preferences, to optimize user workflows and to develop the set of unique functionalities, which are the distinguishing mark and foundation of the service.
After establishing the concept and choosing the set of the unique functionalities, we started to work on graphic design. At the beginning, we focused on the home page. It consists of two features: firstly, it’s a showcase which encourages people to join Photler’s community. Secondly, it’s the place, where users can find an interactive world map and search for photos from various cities and countries.
The website features a mobile responsive framework, using our own custom Crafton CMS which is fully adapted to the project’s requirements.
After months of preparations, in April 2016 we officially launched beta version of the website to the audience.
A teaser campaign, which took place before the launch, created a feeling of eager expectation among people who already knew we were working on Photler. Thanks to that, just a few days after the service launch, the group of users included famous travellers from all over the world.
All of the useful functionalities we offer (e.g. an interactive map with a list of photo galleries pinned to the certain location, expanded logged-in user section, which enables an exceptionally easy template’s adaptation, as well as connecting users’ own .com domains and ability to sell photos with 100% profit for photographers) contributed to placing the website in the lead of hobby and lifestyle themed internet pages.
The Crafton Digital Agency’s team is still working on promoting, optimizing and development of the service.
Timescale: August 2016 - March 2017