Canon 60D, Tamron 17-50mm, f13, ISO100, 20s, 17mm
WELCOME
I can’t begin to tell how excited I am to introduce you to the brand new Jim Denham Photography website! It’s been a long time in the making, but is finally here! Welcome!
I apologize to everyone for the inconvenience of moving from SquareSpace to Blogger, then from Blogger to here, but it was a transition that needed to happen, for many reasons. The first move from SS to Blogger was one of economics – SS was just too expensive to maintain, or at least I thought it was at the time. The website was primarily my blog and it just didn’t seem to make sense to keep spending that money when I could blog on Blogger or WordPress.com for free. So I switched.
Just as I was getting comfortable with Blogger, I attended Jeremy Cowart’s LifeFinder Tour in Minneapolis. While attempting to embarrass a couple of folks by reviewing their website to the entire class (not really), one thing became very evident, your website needs to reflect who you are, both as a person and a photographer. This hit me pretty hard because my site through Blogger did not do that. It was my blog, not really my website. It was at that point that the wheels started turning.
There were a couple of things that needed to happen prior to developing the site, though. The first thing was to decide who was I was. That sounds odd to say, but as a photographer, before I could convey it on the site, I needed to determine what the site needed to tell people about me. Not only the type of photography, but overall. The other thing was a logo. I’d say new logo, but I’ve never had one, so any logo would be my first.
Surprisingly, both of these tasks took more time than expected to develop. It was just a couple of weeks ago when the logo came about thanks to Mr. Jon Stolarski of JS Photography and Design. Once the logo was in hand, the speed to develop was actually very fast – thanks to Scott Wyden and Photocrati. Scott’s been a tremendous help in learning about the Photocrati theme and WordPress – Can’t thank him enough for his willingness to jump on a G+ Hangout to physically show me how to put this here and that there. Thank you Scott.
As far as the Photocrati theme, it’s amazingly easy to customize and flexible – I highly recommend it! As far as WordPress, that was a different story. it’s taken me a while to really get used to moving around in it, but it’s starting to make some sense now.
Let me take you on a tour. There are really two menus to consider, the one at the top of the page to the right and the busy area at the page footer. The middle is all body – no sidebar, links or anything else cluttering it up. That was important to me and I’m glad it’s that way. The top menu is the main navigation. Most of the menu items have submenus attached, so all you have to do is hover your mouse over each item and the submenus will appear. The Info menu contains stuff about me and the booking/pricing process of my business. All of the loaded Galleries are found under the Gallery menu, along with a link to my SmugMug site for my entire gallery of images.
The Blog menu is pretty obvious, but there is a submenu for video screencasts, which is not totally complete yet, but there is some content there now. You can find my favorite photogs, resource sites and podcasts under the Links menu, along with a set of links for the HDR Collaboration. Finally, the Contact page is exactly what it says, a place to get in contact with me.
Most of the same info can be found on the page footer, along with a place to subscribe to the RSS feed and email, blog archive, social links and a search box.
Please take this as an invite to investigate the site, see what works and what doesn’t. Let me know if you run into any bugs that need addressing. Your input would be awesome in trying to fine tune and improve the site. I want it to be easy and clean, much like me (except for the clean part that is).
And sorry for the Star Wars title steal, but it seemed suitable to the post. I’ll try to be more creative in the future.
- Aperture: ƒ/13
- Camera: Canon EOS 60D
- Focal length: 17mm
- ISO: 100
- Shutter speed: 20s
