Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been assembling my new gallery website and today I’m pleased to be rolling it out to all of you!
I decided after the first of the year that a new website was in order. The previous one, built on TTG Pages, worked just fine for me but honestly was harder to update than I wanted. Sure, the integration with Lightroom was exceptional but I had a whole list of hand fixes I had to apply after generation. That wasn’t much fun and made updates harder than necessary.
I wanted to move to the WordPress platform when I moved to TTG Pages a few years ago. At that time I felt like the photo gallery themes available just weren’t what I was looking for so I ended up steering away from WordPress. I loved WordPress though and could see that it was really the place to be. Enter RC Concepcion and his book Get Your Photography On The Web. Inside this book RC covers all sorts of topics about putting your photography on the internet including getting a host, setting up WordPress, using a theme, and many, many fine points. I was familiar with setting up WordPress sites so those parts of the book were repeats but it was the fine points that made the book really useful for me. Anyway, much of what RC suggested or demonstrated I worked into this site revision.
I find it interesting how sophisticated websites have become. My original sites where I posted photos and stories were hand coded HTML. Making new content was real work! I then graduated to Gallery2 which made adding new images really easy. Setting up the site and configuring the appearance though was not much fun. TTG Pages was another improvement in that I could do all the work in Lightroom and rebuild the site with a button click without lifting more than my index finger once…well mostly. Now I’m using WordPress which, except for a few small issues related to the theme, was a snap to set up and is absolutely a breeze to add content with.
Moving forward dogcaught.com will remain where I blog my railroad related thoughts. No changes there. As time goes on I may take advantage of the blogging capabilities on steveeshom.com to share my other work with added commentary. Right now my Flickr photostream is working just fine for getting my images out into the world though.
When you have a few minutes head on over and browse around. Remember all the images are available as prints!
