My apologies for the last couple of bleak blogging months! I have had to concentrate on finishing my semester, which I believe I have done, in a very sort of fluid, revisions-can-be-done-later kind of way… Now I just have German all summer. (A whole year in twelve weeks.) However, I have four great weddings to post over the next couple of weeks. One is ready to go… Anna and Matt’s Persian & Scottish celebration was the first of 2008 and will be up shortly!
Now for the obvious: If you’ve been here before you’ve probably noticed a few changes with the website and blog. I haven’t worked with a graphic designer yet, so things aren’t looking as lovely as they could be, but I just couldn’t wait to get a new site up and running. In the mean time I have cobbled together a treatment of the studio name and a blog header to tell you where you’re at.
Instead of dividing my portfolios into the events of a wedding as I had done before, into categories such as Reception, Ceremony, Getting Ready, etc., I have chosen to divide the portfolios according to themes. A wedding can also be viewed according to its constituent themes of friendship, seriousness, joy, chaos etc. Since my studio name is a Latin adjective, I chose to name all of the portfolios accordingly. Most of the words have English cognates, so it should be fairly accessible Latin. Gravitas = ‘seriousness’ for example, continuitas = continuity, and so forth. It’s a little tongue in cheek—but I have been warned that a dead language could possibly alienate people. Let me know what you think if you have any thought on the matter. Thanks!
My first website went live in March 2005. I worked with a local designer and he did a great job of building an elegant, playful little flash website that served me well for three years. As is often the case, however, good designers get very busy sooner or later with bigger, corporate clients, and are hard to get a hold of for updates. In any case, I wanted a site which showcased larger images, which I could customize without much fuss, and which could be read by search engines—not the case with my first all-Flash site.
Over the last couple of years I have noticed a surge in companies making template websites for photographers: Blu Domain, Parade, LiveBooks, clickbooq, and so on. These sites can be easier for the technically-challenged, less expensive, and certainly a lot quicker than hiring a designer to build a website from scratch. In the end, the basic programming doesn’t need to be very original…just show some pictures…more or less in the middle of the screen.
The decision came down to clickbooq and LiveBooks. Both companies make attractive, simple websites. LiveBooks sites offer a little more aesthetic customization, especially when it comes to menus and navigation, but their image aspect ratio is not the standard aspect ratio of photographs, and I was unsatisfied with having to crop all of my images. As for search engine compatibility, both companies do the only thing that works for flash-based websites, which is to create a ghost html site. Livebooks, however, will not host blogs. clickbooq will host WordPress blogs, meaning that the web traffic to the blog and the content on the blog can be used by search engines to find my site.
In the end clickbooq won out, and the new site is now live. Please have a look around and tell me what you think. Ich muss mein Hausaufgaben finish.
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