Starting Over
Posted on 11. Dec, 2009 by Thomas in Blog, Site News
If you were a regular visitor to this site you no doubt realise that it has undergone some major changes. I had been unhappy with the design for some time and recently I have been working hard behind the scenes on a new look. The makeover though is more than just skin deep. When I set about re-designing my site the last time I had two goals for it. One was as a portal to establish a (very basic) photography business and the other was as a photo blog and a place to share my joy of photography with the world. Unfortunately the way my site was laid out it had become difficult to do either.
Updating galleries was painfully tedious and involved a lot of hand coding. The blog was mixed in with the home page and the result was a mash up of content that was confusing and not very nice. I searched and searched for a better solution. What I wanted was a way to present my photos in a large format upfront whenever someone visited the site. I wanted it to have impact. I wanted my photography to be the first thing people saw when they first came to the site. I had considered hand coding a separate start page, using some flash galleries and then linking that to a separate wordpress blog, but it kept coming back to the same problem. I really needed something that was easy to update and maintain.
Salvation came in the form of a premium wordpress theme from the good folks over at WooThemes. I had signed up for the WooThemes developer package a while ago as I was working on some other web sites at the time. They recently launched a new theme called “Exposure” which offered some pretty great options for photoblogging. But even more than that it enabled one to use wordpress as a full bore content management system for a photography website. It allowed me to do what I wanted to do all in one system and more importantly, I didn’t have to go near flash. So two weeks ago I set up a testing server locally on my imac and began customising and altering the theme for use on the new site.
I am not a web designer. I dabble now and again, but I am certainly not an expert. With that in mind I am particularly proud of what I’ve achieved here. Again kudos has to go back to the developers of the original theme. They have designed it in such a way that it is very easy to alter and keep track of. I’ve done some theme customising before but this is the most advanced level of alterations that I have ever attempted to achieve.
The result is a site that allows me to easily change the images on the home page by using the standard wordpress tools. So now I can change images out regularly without having to do some coding joo joo, and hopefully it will make the visitor experience more dynamic. I also have an integrated blog and I’ve set it up so that the posting area is bigger, meaning images posted in my blog posts will be bigger and therefore a better experience to readers there too.
I really hope you like the new look. Like I said, I’m not a web developer so I am really proud of what I’ve managed to achieve. So please have a browse around and give me feedback on what you think, and if you see anything that you think might need to be improved.
I hope that this will be the start of a new chapter for me on this site. I really love photography and I really want to create a vibrant weblog. Before the design issues were constantly niggling at me and it put me off, so I hope now to go at it full bore and give you the reader a reason to come back and enjoy sharing my passion for photography.
Thanks and enjoy.
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Hi Thomas,
Liking the new layout. Very easy to navigate and crisp and clean.
Regards,
Bob
Thanks!
Your site looks amazing and as another non-webdeveloper, I feel the same way! It was lovely to read. Good luck with your new site
Hi Thomas, awesome work on the re-design, and glad we could be a part of it.
Thanks. It means a lot.
Thanks Mark, and thanks to everyone at WooThemes for creating such a great framework to build off