Many may have noticed for the past few weeks my blog articles have been sparser. Unfortunately, I wasn’t trialing the new Canon 60D or 8-15 Fisheye lens (Canon, you can always send new equipment to me to try!), I have been hard at work on several projects. Over the next few months I am going to share some of those projects with you, but today I announce that I am finished with one of the more major ones - a website overhaul. As part of this announcement I am going to provide a little insight into my design requirements and the history of my website.
First, a fun (and a little disturbing) look at the last 10 years of the Journey of Light Photography website. I hopped on the Wayback Machine (Internet Archive) as far as it would go to get some of these images.
Egads! What was I thinking? This was my website design in 2000. Well, I guess navigation was easy, but all those frilly images probably took a long time to load on the dial-up connections of the day. I can understand why this was my look for only about 1 year. I bet it was well-optimized for Netscape though! (The centered - black background - top menu look is oddly cyclical)
Ahh, the days of tabs. From 2001 until about 2003, my website sported tabs and my first little flash animation (that Journey of Light in the corner moved!). I will say that my website looked slightly better than this, the Internet Archive didn’t have all the data. It didn’t look much better, though!
From 2003 until 2005 my website design switched to the left-hand menu look at the time. Additionally, I put in a back-end XML framework which still exists, even on the new website (though modified). I also did fancy stuff like add-ins that automatically re-sized photographs and sorted things. Slow and ineffective.
Ahh, my 2006-2010 website. I did away with the fancy add-ons and went back to basics. During the past four years it’s been viewed by roughly 110,000 unique visitors (give or take 10,000). Not bad, but it can be better. Out of a little sentimentality, but mainly because search engines still reference it and occasional returning visitors ask me to find something on the old site, I always leave the old structure up for 1-2 years. This site will remain, somewhat hidden, during that time.
Now, my requirements for my new and improved website.
As I mentioned, my previous design had the same format for roughly 4 years. In a world where people get a new cell phone every 3 months, my design was stale, but effective. During those years I will say that I continued to update the site, placing new photography out weekly and sometimes daily, adding e-commerce links, new pages, and search functionality. But, just like a house that gets addition after addition, after a while stuff tends to look tacked on and not part of the normal flow. As such my first design requirement was simplification.
In addition to adding pages, I spent a lot of time on optimizing the site for search engines. Since I am not Art Wolfe or Thomas Mangelsen, I can’t just sit back and let people search me by name. I wanted to retain the work I did on SEO, although there is always risk with any major change to a website. My second requirement was continued Search Engine likability.
Over time Internet speeds have generally increased, but not everyone has the fastest line and I want everyone to have a good experience. My third requirement was to maintain a fast loading time or to make it even faster.
About 3 years ago, I spent a lot of time making sure that my site was cross-browser compatible. It took some time, but I managed to get it looking the same between Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. My forth requirement was good cross-browser compatibility.
Lastly, I wanted it easy to use. I’ve always tried to provide an intuitive site that could be accessible and easy to navigate. As my last website evolved, it became obvious from my web statistics that the advanced features such as search and keyword look up were not be utilized. My last requirement was to streamline this and to implement a search function that working like most of the search functions out there.
For the last few months I have been gathering ideas, looking at effective navigation, preparing code, and bugging my wife to put it through its paces (Thanks, Holly!). I launch my new website, Journey of Light 2010!
