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Richmond, VA based award-winning photographer Rebecca D’Angelo has some incredible achievements – just one of which includes having her images of Hurricane Katrina: 10 Months After the Storm in the permanent collection of the Library of Congress. Equally impressive is her website design and chic, clean style she utilizes. We couldn’t wait to have her be our featured website this week, and we think you’ll love her site, too!

Read on and then head over to www.rebeccadangelo.com!

Q: How would you describe the aesthetic of your site in three words?

RD: Clean, Intimate, Contemporary

Q: How do you choose the photos that you display on your homepage?

RD: I have an editor, Suzanne Sease, that I usually work with every year or two and she generally picks the images and puts them in order for me. Whichever is first for each portfolio is the one that pops up on the homepage. Sometimes, if I take a new favorite and I find the time, I will switch it up myself.

Q: How often do you update your website?

RD: Not very often, unfortunately! All this technology has made life more complicated and seems to zap us of all our time. I have a sense of inertia that tends to set in. When I switched to the Scaler site, I sat on it for over a year because I knew it would be a gargantuan task to track down all my original photos and resize them. It was good, however, because I had not updated it in a while, except for a portfolio on the site titled “New Work.” I spent last summer compiling images and getting a lot more of my current work to show Suzanne, as well as some of my projects.

Q: What is your favorite feature that liveBooks offers?

RD: I joined liveBooks pretty much in the beginning. Suzanne had recommended it to me, and felt it was the best. I couldn’t agree more when I saw the sites. I was looking for something uber photographer friendly and clean that wasn’t going to eat up all my time trying to figure out. Having worked in photojournalism most of my career, and with photo-editors, I felt that the simpler and the cleaner, the better. It should be about the photographs. I do not like blogs, I don’t want to scroll down, I don’t want to be overwhelmed with too much text or imagery. Before liveBooks, I would pay someone to update my site every time I needed it done. I loved the look of liveBooks, and I love that it is easy to navigate and doesn’t try to be all fancy schmancy. The new Scaler sites are great; I love that my website has one look on my desktop and another look on my phone (one is black background, the phone is white). My favorite features are that I can link and generate spider capabilities on the Internet and I love that I can upload and change images at will, without any hassle. Also, I have two websites: www.rebeccadangelo.com which features my published editorial work and projects, and www.rebeccadangelophotography.com features my animal photography and pedestrian work. I can link the two sites in multiple ways without interfering with the look of either one. I had looked at other sites to use for my work but never found them as clean and as much of an industry standard as liveBooks. It feels much more like the book I used to drop off at magazines back in the day. I can always tell a liveBooks site, and I know that the person using it is typically a photographer of merit.

Q: What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to someone designing their website?

RD: My advice would simply be not to try to be too trendy. Keep it clean and simple. Editors look at hundreds of sites a week and if they have to work too hard to use your site, or if the first image doesn’t catch them, they are moving on.

Have a website you’d like us to feature? Email us at social@livebooks.com.