Still trying to catch up with myself and lots of client web work, but I finally got time to sort and process the photos I took at the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market recently.
I built and maintain their website, and I also donated a bunch of my photos from last year, which got some good use, so I was up the hill again this year.
Here’s a slideshow of some of the pictures I took:
I’ve just launched a new site for Santa Fe-based landscape photographer, master printer and teacher Alan Ross.
Alan was looking for a site to showcase his great work, his workshops and his tech-related blog. He explains, ” I had very little ability to make updates and changes to my old site, and besides needing a new look, I desperately needed a site that I could manage almost entirely by myself, with no working knowledge of code and HTML, and no special, expensive software.”
Enter WordPress and Photoshelter. We chose the Crisp Photoshelter theme as the basis for the design, but tweaked a number of elements to create the templates that would work across both the text (WordPress-driven) and image-heavy (Photoshelter-driven) parts of the site.
First up was adjusting the navigation to include all the sections that Alan wanted — Workshops, Shop and Blog, as well as the usual About and Contact info.Then we darkened the overall background (which meant changing the shadow around the main content area), added a grey background to the thumbnails and single image display, and created a dark border to set off the gorgeous black and white images. Subtle tweaks, but ones I think work well.
Alan’s Portfolio is set up as one Collection, so he can continue to add as many galleries to it as he needs to. The searchable Archive is another Collection.
The Blog is set up as a WordPress blog, with the other sections of the site created as WordPress pages. So Alan can easily update both the text and images, while the whole site looks like one clean, consistent whole.
And he’s happy with the result: “David Moore listened to and heard my website needs, was responsive to my questions, and was all-around a complete pleasure to work with.”
Alan’s site: www.alanrossphotography.com.
The Santa Fe International Folk Art Market is this weekend, and the New Mexican newspaper have just published their regular supplement for the Market.
And I’m pleased to say they used a bunch of my photographs, including 6 on this spread (I greyed out the ones that aren’t mine).
Santa Fe is a town with a lot of grandparents. Folks move here when they retire, and children who grew up here often have to move away to find work.
So it was no surprise when I got a baby portrait session booking from a grandmother for when her daughter was in town for a visit with the new grandson, nine-month-old Joseph.
Building websites for photographers – sounds easy, right? You just throw a bunch of photographs up, add some contact details, make it look cool, and Bob’s your uncle.
Especially when there are services like LiveBooks, APhotoFolio, and software like Evrium’s Fluid Gallery to help. There are even plug-ins for WordPress that promise to knock out a gallery site in no time. And sites like Photoshelter or Smugmug will even handle print sales for you.
The problem is, as Juan Pons so accurately pointed out in his good post recently, that none of the options right now offer all the functionality photographers need to display, market, manage and sell their images effectively. Especially in an arena where search engine optimization and social media are so important.
I’m going to look at the current state of play with Photoshelter, as it’s the service I’m most familiar with, and which seems to me to offer the best framework for building a fully comprehensive photographer’s site. I’ll also make suggestions for how it could improve further.