Site Updates (New!Improved!)
If you read the most recent 6FPS newsletter (if you didn’t, you can subscribe here) in it I wrote about coming to a realization that I needed to rethink how I my images on the net. I’d been using a dedicated Wordpress site to do so, and while there were decisions I made 2 years ago where that made sense, it really didn’t make sense any more, and it was getting very few pageviews and required ongoing maintenance, which occasionally broke in mysterious ways.
So, I decided I needed to redo it all.
Ten days and a lot of futzing in Lightroom and Squarespace later, my updated site is now live. It’s not a re-design (thank god), but I did update and clean up some aspects of the site I’d decided I didn’t like.
Here are the highlights of the updates:
Gone is the old galleries site, replaced with images hosted on my main squarespace site
The photography page was completely redone, and keeping with my 2022 theme of “simplify”, I think I made things at lot simpler and easier to navigate and find. Where before I had my images broken up in a bunch of ways (Best of Years, Bodies of Work, porfolios and galleries), all pointing off in different directions, I now have Portfolios (Birds, Landscapes, Wildlife and Black and White), and Collections (Everything else, with best of years being found inside this).
When I took a fresh look at the photography page, I sort of came to the impression that whoever designed it wasn’t exactly proud of the images; they were secondary and often kinda of hidden. I’ve fixed that by making the images bigger and more prominent, and reducing the number of clicks needed to find and/or see them.
I needed to invent a new way to distribute the wallpaper images I give away, so I did. This new way allows you to grab a collection with a single click and download it as a ZIP file, and I think it’s easier to see what’s in each collection so you can better choose which ones you want. I’ve done the same for the wallpapers only 6FPS subscribers can get (hint: another reason to subscribe) which I’ll publish in the next newsletter.
I went in and re-processed and remastered almost every image on the site, including the wallpapers. I think they are much improved, and I do suggest if you’ve downloaded wallpapers in the past, pull down fresh copies.
I realized the new wallpaper distribution could also be used for my e-books, so I redid the e-book area, and again, whoever designed that page (cough) didn’t seem really confident in the content it was distributing, and I think I fixed that. You no longer need to go through the store and “buy” them, which some people were hesitant to do. I never really loved that distribution setup, either, and so now, it’s gone.
Did I mention that I remastered almost every image on the site, including the wallpapers? I have really come to love and appreciate the Topaz Labs Sharpening and Denoise modules, and I think they do a wondrous job of two aspects of image processing I never felt I was really good at.
I ended up updating the front page of the site as well, to bring the photography forward and simplify the look and navigation, bringing my photography forward onto it more, and cleaning up how I present and offer the ebooks.
I also changed how I present the 6FPS subscription offer, making it smaller and I hope a little more enticing.
Other parts of the site weren’t changed. I am thinking of revamping the 6FPS and Birding pages down the line, but not right now.
I think this better represents who I am today, as opposed to who I was a couple of years ago. Minor tweaks, simpler to use, and the images look a lot better to my eye. All good.
Doing this project created a couple of other projects for me, behind the curtain things you probably won’t notice, but will ultimately allow me to discontinue some services I pay for to make all this possible. I love Wordpress, but in terms of ease of use and an overall lack of ongoing maintenance, I do believe my shift to Squarespace was a really good choice. I was able to build all of the new pages behind the scenes, then with some quick drag and drop and tweaking some URL definitions, it all came live without a hiccup. Wordpress CAN be that easy, but often — isn’t. Even better, Squarespace made it easy for me to make parts of this site modular, so when I add new collections or a new portfolio, it’s quite simple — so I’m more likely to do so.
If you haven’t downloaded wallpapers or one of my e-books in the past, now, it’s even easier to find and download. A goal was to make the bits I consider most important single clicks, and reduce the number of places where you had to navigate through sub-pages to find things, and I think I mostly succeeded. There are still improvements to consider, but… web design can also be an infinite task if you let it.
I do plan to continue adding more collections of images over time, and I may well remove or change some of the existing ones — I’m thinking my way through how I want to present my wildlife refuge images and that’ll impact the ones I have for Merced down the road. But for now, I like what’s now available, and I’d love to hear what you think about the changes.
