While most won’t notice that the site is new, since it looks almost exactly the same… the site is new. This is part of the kick-off of the fall promotional push that includes the new in-home focus. It’s about a week turnaround time plus shipping on photo Chrismas/Hanukkah/Holidays cards so there’s about 6 weeks left to get those done. Templates are at http://www.pickyourholidaycard.com/ and samples will be here next week.
Stop by the Tri-Cities Women’s Expo, the Bzen Solutions booth has a raffle to win a free portrait session including a free 11×14 print. They also have some discount cards to hand out that are worth picking up.
The in-home aspect of what I offer is now my new focus. My studio has always primarily consisted of lightweight gear, most of which goes in bags that sling over my back. I’ve paid a hideous premium for my Bogen ultra compact (19″ collapsed!) lightstands. Half of my umbrellas are double-folds. My entire backdrop support system is one of the bags that sling across my back. A lot of my best children’s work has been in people’s homes already.
Moving completely to this has a lot of upsides, both for my and for my clients. For me there’s no studio rental overhead. For clients I don’t have to pass studio rental overhead on. (I still have the option to use a local studio, if clients so desire). But, really, that’s not the biggest thing. Children are more comfortable at home. My wife likes to tell the story of pair that raided their play chest and came out in dozens of costumes, wanting photos in each and every one.
The foremost of the new site features is the “What’s New” section, which doesn’t actually use that title anywhere. It’s the three columns at the bottom of the new front page. The leftmost is blog entries (ie this), the center is recent portrait sessions, and the rightmost is recent events, including the school sports that I cover. This replaces the “recent galleries” section that was automatically updated whenever I changed anything in a gallery, so often wasn’t actually recent. It also includes a link to see all, which I hope will make it easier for people to find their photos. I may also try out a <yourname>.domain system, probably with my confidentphoto.com domain so I could also do a splah page to help people find them.
From a technical perspective the site is now basically running on WordPress, which was a blogging engine that has emerged as a decent content management system. It’s a pretty flexible framework that I’ve made a lot of changes to to get the look and feel right. This is going to be an ongoing process. The galleries, and the portfolio slideshow, are done by PhotoShelter. PhotoShelter provides infrastructure to manage the many thousands of images I have online, provide online sales, etc.