This really exemplifies something I've been thinking about throughout this set (thanks for Anonymous in Houston for kicking off this thought process!). In person, I really liked the overall feel of this decor package; however, going through the pictures, I'm not a fan of many of the individual elements. I'm starting to feel like that's a shortcoming of showing a store through photos, and perhaps even more so for my specific format (I tend to have a lot of detailed views and not enough overview pictures, something that I should try to work on). I suspect that full blog posts rather than posting individual photos (with AFB's style being a good example) are somewhat better for this, and perhaps video tours would be even better (though I very rarely watch retail video tours... I prefer photographs myself). Either way, I don't intend to make major changes to my format anytime soon, but this is something I will try to keep in mind in the future, both when photographing and posting stores. As an aside, I first started thinking about this with Kroger's Artisan, but for the opposite reason -- I very much dislike the overall feel of that decor package, but I actually quite like a lot of its individual elements.
I didn't realize that I had set off any thoughts about the format of the blog! I agree that photos are sometimes misleading. Sometimes I look up photos of stores I know well and the photos make the store look completely different from what my in-person thoughts are about a place. It is in my estimation that photos usually make stores look better than they look in-person, but sometimes the opposite is true with stores that do have some level of disarray (I'm mainly thinking of Eddie Lampert type operations here, lol). In the case of disarray, sometimes the photos make things look worse than they really are.
ReplyDeleteI know there are some people out there who love retail videos, but some of them are just terrible. It's several minutes of shaky footage where you mostly end up seeing the videographer's feet more than anything of substance, lol. There are some great retail videographers, most of whom do voiceovers in post-production, but all of that takes time and resources which might be beyond the scope of what makes sense to do. Thus, I prefer the photos.
There are some different ways of presenting the photos. I've never blogged with Blogger, but I do have some experience using WordPress as a HHR guest blogger. I do quite like the WordPress galleries where I can set up a block of thumbnails, often quite large ones, and then caption each individual photo while creating a larger narrative using the body text.
One thought is to maybe continue to release the daily photos and text as you do, but then perhaps when you're done with a set, create a summary post where all the photos and text are on one page for more holistic review. Maybe that's the best of both worlds.
Ha, it's about the comparison between this decor and the older Sprouts decor that you mentioned! Like I said, I'm not planning any format changes at this point -- I'm just going to try to keep that sort of perspective issue in mind and try to focus a little better on the big picture rather than nitpicking individual little elements (emphasis on try!).
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