Its time for a Sierra Club Calendar Submission. I used to submit to them for many years when I shot film, but there was a huge gap in time for them to catch up to the digital world, and just last year they began accepting submissions of digital photography. While that was a big step forward, it is still one of the most time consuming submission I prepare, due to the specific forms required, which is basically analog. It would be nice to see some sort of thumbnail reference form, as that is more in line with the many digital asset management programs that all us photographers use. Getting them a preview resolution file, and renaming them appropriately is not problem, but itemizing each on a sheet of paper is a clog in efficient workflow.

Below is my submission for 2012, which is basically a print out of a lightbox on my website that has embedded links to the preview image. It looks nice on my website but the style sheet here won’t let me control the layout without lots of work. This is not what I send them, but rather the environment I work in to collect the images for inclusion. I then make a catalog set in Lightroom and export the files as 1000px jpegs for their review. Including the paperwork as necessary.

You can see any image larger by clicking on the thumbnail.

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.

We have been updating our website with organizational interfaces to make searching and browsing for pictures a little easier. Our website currently serves a dual purpose of offering both stock imagery and fine art prints, and while a photo researcher may like many variations on the same image for layout and design reasons, this is generally not the case for someone looking for a fine art print . Plus, with 1000′s of images, it takes a while to search around. The gallery pages are collections of 50-100 images that we hand picked for various reasons, and hopefully it will offer an easy way to scan through a bunch of pictures. Here are just a few quick links to some galleries with many more on the Alaska photo galleries index page.