I remember once upon a time, before facebook, before technoratti, when building websites was easier. There was none of this "Digging up" websites, or making tweets about every small detail in your life. It was simple, the more money you dumped into advertising or just spamming your website every where imagineable; the better returns you would see. Now there seems to have been some paradigm shift. Im' not quite sure when, but I'd be willing to venture a guess at around 2005-2006...Right as I joined the military and got out of web development.
It's difficult now. You have to ensure that your site is XML compliant, your meta data is right. Can people subscribe to my RSS feed? Does that Digg button work? Did I code that right for posting this as a facebook link? If you ask me, it's all too much....
Which, well, I'll give them a shameless plug here, but Squarespace.com provides an AWESOME and outstanding service. Granted yes, this blog is just basicallly a nice version of wordpress, but I think it pulls it off. Quite well.
For people like me, who have a tiny bit of knowlege of Web 2.0 design, but not nearly enough to maintain (well at least) a site with wordpress...I think squarespace.com really got it right.
I'd like to thank 2 fellow sportsshooter.com members, Chris Corradino and Danny Munson for introducing me to the wonders of squarespace.
More specifically I'd also like to credit Danny Munson with introducing me to Exposuremanager.com It is an excellent alternative to smugmug or one of it's clones.
So why would I say that you ask? Well, one HUGE selling point for me was that untill a customer purchases an image, I am not required to upload a print ready version. Which also means, I'm able to save a ton of time by not fully post processing photos untill they are sold.
For quite a few of my friends, who are part time webdevelopers, these sites probably come as bad news. Sorry guys.
-Adam
Tuesday, September 1, 2009 at 3:07PM