In case you haven’t noticed, I have made some subtle changes to my website and blog. The blog format has been updated a little to make navigation easier (you’ll notice the navigation bar on the right is a better).

But more importantly, I have moved to a new domain – www.shaneambry.com. This will be the permanent home for my photographic exploits. Well, until the next time a day ends in “y” and I get a hare brained idea to change something…

If you’d like to keep up to date with things here, the easiest way is to subscribe via RSS, which you can do by clicking on the link in the right hand column marker ‘Entries RSS’.

I can’t help myself….

Even though the website and blog were up and running, I felt the need to ‘polish the penny’, so to speak. I had been frustrated with the fact that the size of the website was too large to view properly on a laptop screen. And some aspects of the slide show were not really professional.

So  here’s what I have done:

• Change the size of the web page.
• Change the background – the damask pattern was kind of cool for a while but I was not happy with how long it takes to render, and how bright it was on the screen. There was not enough contrast against the central window of the web page.
• Swapped the navigation bars around so that the main menu is above the images, and the portfolio menu appears at left. Because I don’t have drop down menus for my three image portfolios, I was not happy that people would easily notice the portfolio names pop up at the top of the screen. This format took some coding to change, but I think it provides a better experience for users. It looks cleaner.
• Spent US$45 (gasp!) to purchase Simpleviewer Pro. This gives me the ability to delete their logo from my web page, to create a home page with a rolling slide show, and to customise more options in the portfolios. I’m stoked with how professional this aspect now looks.
• Changed the background of the blog to line up with the background in teh rest of the website. I still want to tidy up the format of the blog a bit more. The template I am using at present is a customised version ot ‘Kubrik’, which is a WordPress default, but is not that easy to customise and gets result to defaults every time I download and instal an update…

As an aside, Simpleviewer Pro gives me the functionality I need, but is not that user friendly. It can be added as a plugin to Lightroom, but some changes require the .swf file to be republished, which requires you to download Macromedia Flash. You can get a 30 day trial, but what happens if I want to customise the flash player on day 31? I am not going to buy MMFlash – way too expensive! If anyone knows of a freeware flash file creator, let me know.

Anyway, that’s where I am up to for now, hope you like the changes.  I am always happy to get feedback, especially suggestions for improvement.

Next step is to revise the blog design and get SEO operational.

Returning to the topic of website design for a while, I want to pick up where I left off last time.

So far, we have talked about the design considerations for a website, whether to buy or build your site, and the key tools that I used to build my site. (more…)