Jurgen’s Photography New Website

After weeks of thinking, designing, rethinking and redesigning, my new website is finally launched. My website is the public face of Jurgen’s Photography. At the end of last year, I moved totally to a site designed in Flash. This was great for image presentation, but bad for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and load time. Flash also requires capabilities from the browser, which can’t be provided from all platforms. I wanted to make the site available for everyone, so that you can even view it from your iPhone.

I decided to create an immediate alternative to the flash site by hand coding it. My HTML was a bit rusty, but it is amazing how quickly you get back into things, when you have to. The created site wasn’t too bad at all, but every little change needed a lot of work in HTML. This was not a long term solution.

My twitter friend @mountainkat gave me some feedback and important pointers and recommended to read the book “Presentation Zen” by Garr Reynolds. This book not only transformed the way I looked at my website, but also the way I do presentations (which I have to do on a regular basis in network meetings). Get this book, if you want to learn clear communication.

After I gained clarity about what I wanted, I needed to identify the right vehicle for the delivery. Hand coding was an option, but not very practical. As much as I like Joomla, I didn’t want to go through the hassles of fine tuning a template and deal with the restrictions of that platform, though it is very powerful. I looked into WordPress, but decided against it for similar reasons. This blog is running on the WordPress platform. Brilliant!

I needed something that helped me to create my vision more visually, but also creates a decent looking and fast loading website. Then I remembered a tool, I used in the past to create websites, Rapidweaver by Realmacsoftware. In cooperation of plugins by YourHead Software, the tool gave me the flexibility I was looking for.

It took me a while to decide on how to present my pictures. Lightbox was okay, but didn’t give me the look and feel I was looking for. There were other options, but I decided at the end for a compromise. For my galleries, I used flash. All essential information and image examples are available without flash and can be viewed from most platforms. I will keep an eye on that and create an alternative for non flash enabled browsers, if it seems to be a problem.

For now I am happy. Let me know, what you think.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 10:04 and is filed under Blog and tagged with Internet, Jurgen's Photography, Presentation, Presentation Zen, Rapidweaver, Twitter, Website. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.