Location: Oxford

Business: Limited edition prints

Website: www.virtual-archive.co.uk

Good morning Ian, good morning Pam, thank you for welcoming us into your home.

Good morning, nice to meet you.

You are the first winner of the Easily Website of the Year competition, could you tell us more about your business and your website?

Certainly, I used to be a commercial car photographer but I had been thinking for a while about a new project of my own – combining my skills in photography with my passion for architecture was the ideal match.

How did this idea come to your mind?

We are lucky to live in the architecturally rich city of Oxford. That gave a real opportunity for me to produce these images of iconic Oxford and college buildings which we now sell worldwide. You can find a lot of romantic postcard views of Oxford, however, none of them has a focus on the architectural side of these beautiful buildings.

Could you explain to us what makes your work unique compared to other images?

I developed a technique which gives the image a different type of perspective from a photograph — more like an architectural drawing.

My work consists of assembling many images of the same building in order to arrive to a perfect flat perspective which we can see in architecture, but with the accuracy of high definition photos. Some of my prints combine hundreds of images and can take months to put together to reach the level of quality you can see on my website.

Indeed it is impressive to see the level of details in your prints, how do you manage to do this?

I started doing this before the digital era, shooting on transparency film. Each shot was developed, then scanned and assembled on my computer. This was very slow, painstaking work! Luckily, thanks to the advent of digital photography, I can now work much faster and with even more accuracy. Last year I produced four new prints of Venice and also started to produce prints of the Cambridge colleges.

How do you sell your prints?

90% of our sales are online. Our website is the perfect medium to reach worldwide customers. Everything is printed in-house on demand. We also sell our work through an art gallery in Oxford, adverts in the Oxford and Cambridge alumni magazines and links on several of the college web sites.

What a chance to be so autonomous with your website! How long have you been with Easily?

For ever! We bought our first domain name in 2000 when we started Virtual Archive and we now have around 10 domain names and two websites: www.virtual-archive.co.uk which sells our limited edition prints and www.ianfraser.co.uk which showcases my commercial work.

That’s fantastic, we are delighted to see that your business has grown like Easily. Congratulations again on your excellent work, here is your ‘Website of the Year’ trophy and your iPod Touch.

Oh…thank you very much!

You also won £100 of Easily vouchers, what do you plan to do with them?

Well, we’ll need more disk space, as my new images are consuming a lot of space, as well as data transfer. We also want to register a couple of new domain names.

Excellent, I’ll suggest you wait a couple of weeks then, as our new hosting will be released this month with up to 20Gb of disk space with unlimited data transfer.

That’s brilliant, that’s just what we need.

Pam, Ian, thank you very much for your warm welcome, and we wish you all the best for 2009.

Thanks and you!

Register with the UK’s top domain name & hosting provider, over 10 years exceptional service & technical support.

http://easily.co.uk