Nope, me neither. But I did hire somebody with almost as much web design experience as my buddies here, the "Pirates of Santa Cruz." They hang out down by the boardwalk on cold foggy mornings, watching the early beach volleyball players and trying to assemble enough money for breakfast (Or so they said) By the way, if you meet these gentlemen, tell them I said hi, and ask the dude missing an eye about the Baltimore Orioles. He's got some stories to tell. Well worth the $5 I gave him after half an hour or so. Who knows, maybe one of these fellas is actually an IT castaway, left over from the Dotcom bust in '99-'01, and he just decided that living on the beach in Santa Cruz sounded better than day after day in a soulless Silicon Valley Cubicle. But I digress. Back to my clueless web designer guy, after the jump.
Oh, and film lives! This is Kodak Portra 160 with the 17-35 on my Nikon F4. I'm at 17mm, practically underneath the brim of the guy's hat shooting this portrait.
My clueless web guy, if you hadn't guessed, is me. I don't know why, as photographers, we go on and on about why you need a professional, trained, geared, and with years of experience, to produce excellent quality photographs, and then we all think that because we read "HTML for Dummies" that suddenly we're web designers. After several frustrating hours bouncing around in GoDaddy's WebSite Tonite! interface, this is what I came up with.
This is the web equivalent of somebody who's trying to figure out which end of the camera to point at the pretty flower. Please feel free to click through to the larger image, and when you're done laughing, come on back...
Okay, are you done?
Good.
I'm not even going to start on my PhotoShelter Archive interface, suffice to say that it's far more powerful and customizable than the kiddie pool at GoDaddy, and I basically drowned there.
If you click the PhotoShelter link above, what you'll see it their absolutely unmodified template. I'm leaving it alone until I know what I'm doing.
I'm sure there are many of you out there who have mastered the twin arts of photography and web design, but until I join your ranks, I'll stick to my camera and let a professional (or at least an advanced amateur) handle the HTML.
Had it not been for the fact that my computer pretty much spent the whole weekend uploading images to the Archive, I'd pretty much have to count the whole thing as a loss. But at least my important pictures from December through this week are now stored on an industrial, geographically redundant server, thanks to PhotoShelter. Now I've just got to get my modem to go over 45.5kbps upstream....
Monday, February 25, 2008
Would you hire these guys to design your website?
2 comments:
Once you get a Mac, you can use Rapidweaver. You can publish a site using one of their templates and look at any HTML. Once you learn more about web development, you can open the hood within Rapidweaver and customize the code.
I'm an amateur photographer, but I see posts in the Rapidweaver forum from professionals who use RW for their photo businesses.
http://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/showcase/index.php
If you have an old box laying around, you might want to try your hand at building your own web server. You can get into it for free using PCLinux. I know there are many flavors of Linux out there, but this is the one that works for me.
Then you can use http://www.dyndns.com/ to help get around the dynamic ip address that most of us face.
This will allow for much faster uploads since you are simple moving files across your network instead of uploading.
You can see all of this happen at my site .
My main site is hosted but all of my galleries are hosted on my local web server. It allows for me to have images on the web in about 5 minutes after I finish building my galleries.
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