Month: February 2010

Categories
Moore Consulting

AIA Santa Fe chooses Moore Consulting to design new architects’ site

We’ve just launched the new site for the local Santa Fe Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), and we’re very happy with it.

With over 130 Regular, Associate, Emeritus and Allied members, AIA Santa Fe focuses on local design and construction issues, supports New Mexico architecture students, provides continuing education opportunities for its members and circulates news and event information. Its lecture and film series are open to the public to bring diverse groups together to discuss architectural issues.

Updating their previous site meant calling its developer, and the site content had grown a little disorganized over time. So two key aims for the new site were that it could be updated by AIA volunteers and that it was structured to allow for additions.

Given the site’s main audience is architects, it also had to look good.

We developed a clean and spare design that incorporated the AIA colors but also left lots of white space. The most recent items added to the site’s News section appear automatically on the front page of the site, and other sections include sublevel navigation that can grow as more pages are added.

A Member Directory and Search feature make it easy to find the contact details for the chapter members, while integration with Paypal allows members to pay for their monthly lunches via the site.

And because the site is built using the WordPress content management system, all the updates and additions across the site are now performed by AIA volunteers.

Site address: http://www.aiasantafe.org

Categories
Aperture Tips/Tutorials

Aperture 3 upgrade problems and fixes

UPDATE MARCH 2010: the release of the Aperture 3.0.1 update seems to have fixed many of the reliability problems. I’m back running in 64-bit mode with Faces working, and things haven’t crashed horribly for a while. YMMV.

After a long wait for the release of Aperture 3, I ignored my own rule about waiting until the first incremental update of new software before installing it. Big mistake.

Upgrading my 20,000 image library meant I fell foul of the apparent memory leak problem that seems to beset the new version.

First I was told I hadn’t enough room on my HD to complete the update – it had filled the spare 35GB on my MacBook Pro internal drive with a giant swap file.

Then the whole machine would hang while Aperture 3 performed some mystery ‘processing’ work on my images. I had no idea if my library was intact, and no way of actually using the product for real work.

The Fix – sort of

Thanks to the useful advice from fellow sufferers on the Apple Aperture Support forums, I binned my first attempt, and cobbled together a solution. I’ve no idea if these will work for you, and hopefully there’ll be an update along soon that will help us all out, but here’s what got me working again.

Continue reading “Aperture 3 upgrade problems and fixes”
Categories
Photoshelter Tips/Tutorials Web design

The Digital Skills Pro Photographers Need Now

Sometimes the younger generation seem to get a handle on all this more quickly

As a photographer, Apple Aperture consultant and web designer for photographers, I spend a lot of time helping other pros.

Recently three episodes have shown me how drastically the photography business is changing, and what range of skills are required to run a successful photography business.

Episode 1 – “WordPress is hard”

I’d just finished a site for a client and had carried out a training session on how to use WordPress to keep the site up to date. The next day I got a call from the flustered photog who had spent the afternoon trying to add one article. ‘This is much harder than I thought it was going to be,’ he explained.

I have some sympathy – for people who’ve never spent any time around a website before, the admin panel and functionality of a content management system takes a little getting used to. But part of his difficulty was that he lacked even basic web skills such as knowing how to copy a link from the address bar of a browser and paste it in somewhere else. This lack of familiarity with what are for many everyday habits made everything else much harder.

Continue reading “The Digital Skills Pro Photographers Need Now”