One arduous journey...for me

Hello there! Thanks a lot for taking the time to view my website and for digging as deep as this blog post.

Given that this is my first blog entry, I was going to start by explaining a bit about myself, but realistically, that already exists on my about page. So, I figured instead I’d explain a bit about this website, the process involved in making it, and why I decided to make it in the first place.

Why did I decide to make a website?

First of all, I wanted two key offerings with this site, a shop and a portfolio. The shop would allow me to start a business with this passion that I obsess about and the portfolio would be great to have for people to view my work in a larger format from distant places. Smartphones are great and all, but they’re so small. Viewing photos at a larger size has a much greater impact. And don’t get me started on large prints. They’re way better yet!

While I do have plans for a variety of product offerings, the first one I’m offering is prints. Prints that can be displayed on a wall or shelf to bring a bit more life to one’s living space and to bring the outdoors indoors. I’ve tested the print quality from the company I’m using and I’ve gotta say, I’m impressed. The paper stock feels thick, substantial, and it comes with a very nice subtle sheen to it. Pair that with a picture frame of your choosing and you’ve got a winner!

As I expand my offerings, I need this website to act as a hub. One consistent location that can house everything. The thing with social media is that if it were to fall by the wayside in any way or decide that they no longer want to support photography, I want to make sure I have another place to share my art with my audience. I may also sprinkle in some educational photography information on this blog for those who are interested. I’ve picked up on a number of photography tips over the years that I’d be happy to share with my audience.

I’ve also decided that going forward, I’d love to get more involved in the photography and creative community. This site will allow people to get to know me a little better as well.

Screenshot of home page while in development.

What did the process of building this website look like?

• Decide on why I wanted a website: definitely the most important step.

• Decide on which website building platform I would use: while I do have some far off experience with writing code to build a website, it is nowhere near enough knowledge to have gotten this far. I knew pretty early on that I would like to create it through a drag and drop system like Wix or Squarespace. Wix is what I ended up using, because I had dabbled with a site on there years earlier and I enjoyed the process.

• Determine which website layout made the most sense for what I plan to offer: I explored many different layouts and styles to see which might be best suited to my content and also compared to websites of other photographers I follow.

• Plan website structure: many of the other sites I researched had content that I knew I wouldn’t require, so I had to be choosy on what to include on my site.

• Cull through the 10s of thousands of photos that I've taken: at this point, I’ve filled memory cards that can hold 9999 photos many times over. Not all of them are keepers, mind you, but it still meant that I had tens of thousands of photos to look through to find which ones to include on this website. In many cases, I’ll have a whole series of a dozen photos of one subject, but I had to look through them all with a fine tooth comb to make sure I’ve included the best image of the bunch.

• Bought a two year Wix plan: during the process of uploading images and content in general to my free site, I quickly ran out of storage space. That’s part of how Wix makes money. They offer additional features and storage space with their paid plans than they wouldn't with their free plan.

• Resized all portfolio images: in an attempt to improve page loading times (not entirely sure if it helped), I resized and reduced the quality of all of my photos for the website.

• Write titles, captions, and alternate text for each portfolio image: titles and captions will accompany each portfolio image when viewed individually. They'll provide context to the photo and any stories that might have come along with the photo taking process for that image. In addition to that, alt text is read aloud for people using a screen reader and it’s used by search engines to find your site and understand it.

• Had to re-write a lot of captions: this was a rookie error on my part. With all my years of experience in the design world, I should’ve known to keep all of my content stored separately from my website itself. Backup, backup, backup. Whoops. I had my website crash at one point during its development and it caused me to lose a lot of my written content that I had created.

• Connected my site to a print on demand company and created a store: I have chosen to use a print on demand company to make the process much smoother and leave me with more time for photography and everything else in life. Plus, it won’t leave me with excess materials if they don’t sell. This company will print, package, and ship the product on my behalf, while taking a cut for themselves.

• Purchased a business email: I figured that having a business email that's separate from my personal one would be beneficial. Plus, business emails are protected in some ways that a personal one are not...apparently. This is new to me, so I don't know if that was wise yet.

• Researched frame sizes: I want to appeal to as many people as possible, so I checked the two most popular stores that I could think of that sell picture frames and chose print sizes that both stores’ frame sizes overlapped on.

• Added a few dozen products: I started with what I felt would be good product options based on the information that I had.

• Deleted and re-added products: as I did more research on products, I had second thoughts on one of the products I was going to offer, so after taking the time to add them all to my store, I decided to delete them and add new ones.

• Ordered a sample print on matte paper: my gut initially convinced me that the printer’s matte paper option would be my preference, so I ordered a sample print of one of my photos on that. It arrived quickly and while the print quality was good, I wasn’t crazy about the paper. I felt it left something to be desired.

• Ordered more samples at various sizes, but on a premium luster paper: the printer had another paper option, so I figured I’d order some samples of three different photos at the other three sizes that I hadn’t yet gotten samples of. This was the paper stock that I was envisioning! The paper made each photo look so much better! Seeing these print results increased my motivation even more to finish this website and get the store live.

• Once again deleted products and re-added some new ones: because I preferred the new paper stock, I had to delete some of the previous store products and re-add them with my preferred paper stock.

• Tested frames of various sizes, colours, and with and without matting: my three newest samples were all of different colours, sizes, and levels of detail, so I felt it was important to see how they’d each look as a print and as a framed print. The photo with fine details (elk hidden in the trees) was a concern of mine and maybe for good reason. For a photo with such fine and small details, I felt it would only look good at a large size, so I opted to take it out of my shop in favour of something with larger details.

• Made functional & visual adjustments to the appearance of the shop products: reduced the spacing between shop products to fit more to a page and added a filtering system to filter products by subject matter.

• Wrote an about page: it’s important for people to have an understanding of who I actually am.

• Wrote this very blog post: I needed to start somewhere, and this entry felt like an appropriate place.

• Wrote contact page: it was pretty straight forward, but still a necessary step.

• Sent testing link to family and friends: once I felt satisfied with where I was at with the design of the site, I sent out a testing link to my site to friends and family to take a look at it and give me feedback.

I anticipate that this list of website development tasks will continue to grow and grow as keeping up with technology and business is a constant moving target.

Although this has taken a considerable amount of my time, I'm thrilled to see it finally come to completion. I've wanted to make a website for a long time now, but for much of that time, I found it difficult to bring it to fruition. This feels like a huge win and an exciting start to something new for me.

Thanks for reading!

Dale