DaveM Photography

New Site

The new site is finally online. It took about a month or so to get everything laid out and transfer all the previous blog posts over from the Blogger site. Here's a little more info on the new site.

 I've been working on several new sites over the last couple months on the Joomla platform. It's an open source CMS (content management system) platform and it's free. If you're unfamiliar with the term CMS, just think Wordpress. I considered several different platforms including Wordpress. During my research I found that there were 3 popular platforms, Wordpress, Joomla & Drupal. Wordpress is a great platform for the end user, but provided limitation in design and customization. Drupal was favored by programmers as it had the most flexibiltiy in customization but could be intimidating & overwhelming to the end user. Joomla struck the right balance between both.

I have been working with Joomla 1.5 and learned the basics of the platform through Lynda.com. At first it was a bit confusing, but after some practice, it became much easier. My site is running Joomla 1.7 which was just released a couple months ago. As you can see, there are several corporate sites that use Joomla. I also found out that there are a lot of free extensions available to add additional features and interactivity to the site. Although I'd like to take all the credit for the design, it was done by Joomlart.com. It would have taken 3 times as long to come up with this design on my own. There are several other companies that develop templates for Joomla, in my opinion Joomlart.com has the best.

Okay, enough with the geeky website stuff. On to the new site and portfolio. One of my requirements for a new site had to do with how to display the portfolio. I wanted large images presented in a professional way. There are photographers that worry about large images and watermarking them so they won't get downloaded. I'm not really concerned about that. There's not much another photographer can do with an imaged downloaded from a website. They may claim it as their own and put it on their own site, but if they don't have the skills to create that kind of work, the client will find out quickly. So I chose not to even worry about it. The other reason I moved over to a CMS based site had to to with the blog posts. I no longer wanted to have 2 separate sites. I wanted one cohesive look for the blog and site. Beside have the same design for 2 years is a lifetime on the web.

The portfolio still has 2 separate sections, 1 for athletic images and 1 for traditional portrait photography. I'm making athletic & fitness photography a focus in my work, but still plan on doing family photography as well, I just won't be pursuing or marketing myself as such.

No worries. There is no annoying music on this site. That's the one thing that really bothers me when I look at other photographers portfolios. They always find a need to add music and most of the time it's they don't provide a way to quickly turn off. First of all, I'm usually listening to music anyway when I'm on the web. Second, I may not necessarily like their tast in music. Lastly, they use copyrighted music that they haven't paid to use. So it seems hypocritical to complain about images being stolen when technically that's what's being done to the music on their site.

There are a couple nice features to the site. On the home page below the slideshow, you'll see the most recent published article on the left side. On the right you'll see the most popular post based on page clicks. You can easily see my most recent post without having to go to the blog.

In the footer section I've included a section of upcoming posts. More than anything it's a reminder for me to stay on top of the blog, but it also provides a preview of upcoming articles. Next is a section with links to social media sites that I'm on.  Lastly, I've set up 3 sections of blogs I follow that relate to photography, athletes, health & fitness.

The blog portion of the site will be the most used and visited. I was able to transfer over over 100 posts. Unfortunately I was unable to transfer comments over. I will keep the Blogger site up, but I don't know if Google will keep it online if there's no activity. I like that this template provides an option to display blog posts in a compact way. This way a visitor and look at the title and decide if they want to read more, then click the link to take you to the full article. Unless it's a short paragraph or two, it should be compact. I bugs me when bloggers post long articles and you have to scroll awhile to reach the next article. It comes across as unorganized, messy and not laid out properly for the convenience of the reader. That's just my opinion, but I think that should be standard etiquette for bloggers.

Looking forward to the start of a new year and everything that comes with it, good or bad. Please feel free to leave comments and thoughts on the new site and portfolio. Thanks.