My blogging life has been usurped by the inertia of my new website, finally moving into its final stage of going public. And that should happen in a few days or so. To the observer, the look has not changed greatly, but it operates under a completely different software. I’ve tried my best to replicate my old site in general structure and organization. Many of the features I’m excited about are back-end things that give me control of client access and file sharing.

I’ve never been one satisfied with templates, or packaged software, which is one reason I had my old site custom designed–along with the fact that there were no packaged photo software applications available when I started this. I’ll be giving up some much loved features of my old site, but gaining enough for me to make the switch. One thing that will be greatly celebrated is giving up the management and responsibility of my own server, with upgrades, blah, blah, stuff you don’t care about.

So, before this thing goes live, I invite you do a little test drive. Things should be pretty much in order, but I’ve got a few days of finalizing some small things. There might be a broken link out there, and if you find one, please let me know. And if you feel so inclined, I’d be happy to hear your comments. But please don’t tell me you liked my old site better or I’ll get depressed after spending months getting files prepped and coding established! Actually, you can tell me that, but I hope you don’t feel that way.

Click away:

The New AlaskaPhotoGraphics

My new website, going live in a few days

This would describe much of my work over the last few weeks. Html code more specifically. I’ve had a searchable website since 2002, and a retrospective glance leaves me with a feeling that I reinvented the wheel in some respects. But, the wheel was very hard to find back then, which is a telling tale of our web-based beginnings.

Even after all these years, I finally made a custom 404 error page, it has remained elusive until now. I’d recommend everyone managing a site to do that. It is relatively easy and you can follow some very simple directions here. This is the page I made which you will see for any string of text following the domain URL, that is not actually a real page in the directory: http://alaskaphotographics.com/xyz

Back to the website in general. I would do so many things differently now, but I feel the same way about the house I built too. All in all, my website–which was a risk at the time–has proved a vital part of my photo livelihood. I’m a little married to the choices made long ago, and have considered a complete redesign and rebuild of the back-end code of my sight. Such a thought (which I would not perform myself by the way) has proved too formidable at the moment, especially when I remind myself that I’m a photographer!

The blending of design, functionality, usability and search engine optimization is a finicky blend, and ultimately a compromise in some measure. Figuring out Search Engine Optimization and Organic search results placement is a pretty greasy marble. I’ve scoured all the general basics and experimented plenty. Some things have worked, some have not. There is always room for improvement in that area.

I’ve watched the continued development of many “stock photo website programs” but I always seem to want those customized options that are not available in the template version. A few important things that I’ve designed into my site are as follows:

• Expandable side bar search panel which highlights and expands your search choice (This has been a tough one to work with, I can’t say it is prefect, but I find it hard to give up. It is not created automatically from the image fields or categories, which has its pros and cons.)
• zip compression on the fly of the side-bar search which facilitates faster load times
• An option for displaying larger thumbs
• Grouping similar images into a stack (it de-clutters the search results but gives designers many options to view from the same scene.)
• Horizontals and Verticals of the same scene will show up next to each other.
• Displaying all the similars when a thumbnail is clicked on to view the main photo
• <div> based thumbs per page, which lets the search results images fill your entire monitor
• Setting privileges for clients to download non-watermarked files both individually, and for an entire lightbox
• Uploading a .txt file of metadata to the web site. (This is a huge one. I can change all the caption, keyword, etc., information of my entire image database in 10 minutes by uploading a text metadata file)
• Print a lightbox feature that includes thumbnails and caption information.
• White border around images in lightbox
• Ability to rank images so they appear in a controlled manner other than date or file number.

My wish list is even longer, but here are a few:

• An entirely revamped shopping cart with more flexibility
• Continuity between static and dynamic pages
• Better Login/User registration interface
• Mouse over previews which include similars.
• Did I mention 1st place rankings in Google?
• A code geek sitting right next to me in my office, on demand, real time.

Many of my colleagues have fantastic web sites, with good and functional integration. Three cheers to you all, I know the amount of work it takes to make it happen. If you are just starting out, study the web, get organized, be accurate and consistent with your keywords and other IPTC field entries.

Samuel Johnson got it right when he wrote “Writing without effort, in general, results in reading without pleasure” The same principle stands for websites.

Screen capture of my website showing 300 pixel big thumbnails in <div> tags which expand according to the size of the monitor. The white border around some tell you that they are in an existing lightbox. This is the image display on a 30" monitor.

Screen capture of my website showing 190 pixel thumbnails in <div> tags which expand according to the size of the monitor. The white border around the thumbnail signifies that it is in the current lightbox. This is the image display on a 30" monitor

My searchable website www.alaskaphotographics.com has exceeded 20,000 photos! Wading through them can be time consuming, sometimes frustrating, and at times, overwhelming I’ve been told. The challenge continues to present itself: How to make this process easier and more accurate for the photo researcher and browser? The solutions create many trade-offs. Web page real estate is valuable, and the variations in monitor sizes and web browser programs are abundant.

We have found a way to zip it on the fly to reduce download size. To further augment the photo search conundrum, I built a series of searchable maps of Alaska that have links associated with the respective categories. At this time, they include maps for Geographic regions, Mountain ranges, Public lands and Towns and roads. I’ll continue to expand this, and streamline it for efficiency and functionality. I’ve got some ideas, but then again, I’m a photographer and it is high time to get out of the office and make some images. I’m always open to suggestions, comments and feedback about the website’s functionality and performance.