I'm damn proud to say I've finally got my photography website up. All done by yours truly using 1990's-style html. I did manage to create a simple Flash slide show for each of my sections (I hear Flash is going bye-bye to be replaced by HTML 5-oh well...). I'll tackle CSS someday, but for now I'm quite happy with my work.
Here's little insight into where my efforts went over the last six months working on this puppy:
1) The greatest amount of work was curating photos. My GOD!! I created the traditional categories you see on everyone's photo websites: Lifestyle, Portraits, Landscape and so on, then spent months organizing the photos into sequences that flow nicely, and throwing out good photos that weren't good enough.
2) I spun my wheels trying to learn to create Adobe Flash slide shows, which I finally mastered at the lamest, low level, but effective none-the-less once I lowered my expectation on how the site would function. I did manage to stay true to my original design, but used draconian, labor-intensive techniques to get it done.
3) I took six weeks off to create photo books for my wife Holly's Christmas present.
Book pdfs are here and here.
4) With the site built and looking nice, I decided I'd left out a bunch of photo categories. I packed in a bunch more, Climbing, Road Trips, and such,. I barfed at the cluster-muck I'd created, then stripped the whole thing down again to what you see now. This included taking a good look at my photo content, then creating all new categories that organically mirror how I take photos. Thankfully, these are more true to my style, not traditional marketing concepts that are irrelevant to me (photograph = money is not my thing).
5) Finally, where and how to put the thing on the web was always lurking in the background. Serendipitously, my friend Eric is working on a website and asked me for help, thereby solving my last problem- how to find a domain name and where to actually put up the site. I'd contacted his provider (StartLogic) to answer technical questions for his website and was smitten with their great service and reasonable prices. Within a hour I'd found an open domain name (www.danhigginsphotography.com is taken- and boring) and got www.danhigginsdesigns.com up on the WWW. I like how there's a nice little alliteration in the site name.
It's nice having a tightly edited set my photos to share with folks, and I can tweak the content and layout to my heart's content. I'd love to hear what people think.
Oh yeah- here's a nice film pic I shot a few months ago.
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