It’s Done!

I’ve been struggling with this idea for awhile.  An “incident” a week ago finally convinced me to make the leap.  I was texting with someone who was interested in a poster-sized photo.  Long story short she asked for my website, I provided the link, and… never heard from her again.  Now, I was at work, and I may have come off as short, which was not my intent but is always possible.  I believe, however, that something else was thwarting me here… my old website was not cell phone friendly.

What is now my old website was an old-style html site.  I am self-taught in html.  I’m not a guru, by any stretch of the imagination, but I can do it and make it look pretty good… for 1999.  Now, personally, I knew it was dated, far from trendy, but I liked it.  And, truth be told, I was very proud of it considering that I had cobbled it together myself.

I went through great pains to make sure all my image files were small so as to load quickly for people.  The thumbnails were ridiculously tiny.  When I wanted to get into blogging I had to compromise and create a separate WordPress site just for the blog, with links going back and forth.  It was clunky, but it worked.

Problem was, I had long thought… but didn’t want to admit… that I was losing people’s interest and sales because so many people use their smart phones almost exclusively.  Many don’t even have a laptop or a desktop computer.  Oh, it would load on my phone just fine, but the text was minuscule.  Who wants to read that?  I had to suck it up and face the realization that, despite my pride in my site, I had to catch up with the times.

With the Memorial Day weekend coming up this would be the perfect opportunity to do a complete reconstruction.  I would have three pretty much uninterrupted days to work.  Earlier this year I started and published a parallel site, Michigan Landscape Photography, which is still slightly rough and incomplete, but is a basis for this site, so I had ideas on which to build.  Most of the thinking I had already done.  The two sites will be virtually identical in appearance when complete… completely integrated and seamless.  The biggest worry was migrating the old blog to the new blog without losing anything, especially since the two had the same URL.  I was relieved that it worked flawlessly.

I did make a command decision.  This site has always been an all-inclusive presentation of all my mid-west photography, with some California recently thrown in after I abandoned an even older website a few years ago.  The new Michigan site is Michigan only, hence the decision was made to restrict this site to Iowa only.  I reserve the right to change my mind and go back, but I feel this will make more sense to most people.  My blogging will not necessarily be restricted, though.  I have another domain (midwest-photo.com), which is currently undeveloped and re-directs to here, that will eventually cover all that I have of the mid-west, including Iowa and Michigan.  Constructing this new site was fun, and fairly quick, and reasonably efficient, and sometimes tedious, and very rewarding.  It’s done!  Kicking and screaming I have been dragged into the 21st century.

After having worked so much on this, I decided to choose a photo that I have already published in a previous blog post from a couple years ago, but considering the purpose of Memorial Day this photo seemed appropriate.  Take a read for some more info, and my next post will be photography related and back on track.

Email Notification List

The one thing I couldn’t migrate was the email notification.  If you were subscribed before… or would like to be a new subscriber to get email notifications of new blog ramblings… you will need to sign up again.  Sorry about that.  Please take a look, and give some comments and feedback on the new layout.