The joys of creating a new website
- February 20th, 2010
- By Rick Walker
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Switching over to Macs recently meant that I finally had to figure out what I wanted to do with my old website. My current one was created using a mishmash of long-discontinued, Windows-only, but reasonably friendly tools. After a few experiments with Expression Web and Dreamweaver CS4, which both made my head hurt, I decided I didn’t want to be a web guru – just a photographer. Most of the flash galleries I’ve tried had one annoying feature: their standard method of showing a full page of images was to truncate them into little squares. For whatever strange psychological reason, that really bugs me with my own images. It’s unfortunate, as many of these galleries are very easy to generate. My goal is to see images in their entirety and not arbitrarily cropped. Believe it or not, I’ve been thinking through options to meet these requirements for almost two years now.
The good news is that I’m finally settling in on an on-line service I like. So far, I’m jazzed by it. Maintenance appears to be easy, the templates are easy to apply and flexible, and there are options for honest to God, rectangular thumbnails. 
I hope to have it all done within a week or two. In fact, it’s mostly ready now, aside from a few minor things I’m tweaking. The nuisances of updating the old one kept me from posting many photos from the last few years, so I’m glad that will improve. A major lesson learned: consider how you’ll update a website over time. Certain approaches are much more time consuming than others, and many of the easier tools just don’t generate good looking websites. A little extra planning helps, although two years is probably extreme.
More to come soon, provided I get the darned thing done.
In the meantime, here’s a look at the new one.
