How to Spot a Great Web Designer from 250,000 miles
Wednesday, September 01, 2010
Grover Sanschagrin, co-founder of PhotoShelter recently wrote a helpful blog post outlining things photographers should think about when choosing a web designer. I agree with everything he says, especially the part where he recommends me.
I’m one of eight recommendations, and Grover explains
I’ve created a list of designers (many of them are also photographers) who I feel are worthy of consideration. All of these designers are also experienced with PhotoShelter’s advanced customization capabilities, which means they know how to integrate all of PhotoShelter’s tools into a website or blog.
If you’re a photographer looking for a new site, especially if you’d like it to integrate it with PhotoShelter, I’d love to hear from you. And you don’t just have to take my word that I can help - you can ask Grover.
New site for Photographer Jeff Henig using Wordpress and Photoshelter
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
I’m delighted to announce the launch of our latest website - it’s for Jeff Henig, an American travel photographer based in Japan, who specializes in shooting cultural and religious festivals across Asia. You can check it out at www.jeffhenig.com.
The challenge
When Jeff first contacted me, he had a blog in one location, a Flash-based portfolio online somewhere else, and a Photoshelter site for his stock archive. He was doing a good job keeping them all up to date, but each had a different look and feel, and navigating between them was confusing for visitors.
New site launched for Alan Ross Photography
Friday, August 07, 2009
I’ve just launched a new site for Santa Fe-based landscape photographer, master printer and teacher Alan Ross.
Alan was looking for a site to showcase his great work, his workshops and his tech-related blog. He explains, “ I had very little ability to make updates and changes to my old site, and besides needing a new look, I desperately needed a site that I could manage almost entirely by myself, with no working knowledge of code and HTML, and no special, expensive software.”
Enter Wordpress and Photoshelter. We chose the Crisp Photoshelter theme as the basis for the design, but tweaked a number of elements to create the templates that would work across both the text (Wordpress-driven) and image-heavy (Photoshelter-driven) parts of the site.
Why I pay for content - and you should too
Thursday, June 18, 2009
The idea that 'information wants to be free' is the driving force behind so much content delivery on the Internet. It sounds good, right - progressive and egalitarian? But it's a tenet that's bankrupting newspapers, impoverishing photographers and redrawing the media map. And if we don't start paying for online content soon, we'll all be the poorer.
My first job in the Internet industry was in 1995, when I went to work for fledgling web consultancy Nua. Gerry McGovern (or 'guru Gerry' as we called him not quite to his face), had this weird idea about 'making free information pay'.
We created a bunch of free email newsletters about web stuff, and became very successful as a result. But for us, successful meant getting paying web development jobs.
This approach is still valid and valuable - you spend time blogging, tweeting and the rest to show how much you know, connect with people and (hopefully) get some paying gigs out of it. Professional content creators - individuals and organisations - can and should do some of this, too.
One traditional way to fund this give-away is by advertising, but since that's never really balanced the books online, we need another plan. Which is why I unfashionably pay for content.
A solution to GMail’s ‘On behalf of’ problem
Monday, April 06, 2009
Like many, I use Gmail as a clearing house for my 'real' addresses. In other words, when you send a mail to , it sits on my mail server only until Gmail comes to collect it, and pull it into its non-evil embrace.Then I check my actual Gmail account (using IMAP so it syncs with my laptop, iPhone and the GMail web interface). I get to use their giant amount of online storage, so there's always a copy in the cloud, and I can get to all my mail (sent and received) from pretty much anywhere with a cell phone signal or an internet connection.
Gmail lets you set things up so when you send mail, it appears to come from your 'real' address, not from gmail.com, so you can be all professional, like.
Not in Outlook
Except in Outlook (and some other mail packages, too, but Outlook is the biggie). What those corporate types see is 'Sent from: Bob Bobbins () on behalf of Bob Bobbins ()' or something like it.
Suddenly you don't look very professional at all. But there is a solution that should work for some people.
Photoshelter showcase my photography site
Friday, March 06, 2009
Photoshelter - the online photo archiving, display and selling site have chosen my Clearing the Vision photography site as one of their examples of customization.
It’s in the Marketing/Promo category on their examples page.
I adapted one of their templates and integrated it with Wordpress to make it easy to update the photo and text sides of the site, while giving it all a consistent look and feel (more details on how I did it in my blog post on Clearing the Vision).
Photoshelter has 40,000 photographers using the service, and they chose around 25 sites as examples, so it’s quite an honour.
New site for Santa Fe Partners in Education
Thursday, March 05, 2009
I’m happy to announce the launch of one of our most recent sites - for the non-profit Partners in Education Foundation for the Santa Fe Public Schools.
The site, like most we work on, is a custom design built on top of the Wordpress content management system. This means Partners in Education get exactly the look and feel they want, but they can also update pages and add news stories themselves.
All David, all the time - Twitter, Flickr and FriendFeed
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
For those (few) of you who might want to keep up with all the random goings on at Moore Consulting Towers, you can now follow me on Twitter: @wycombiensian.
I can’t promise I’ll be funny or insightful, but I can promise a pretty regular flow of tweets.
You can see my recent Flickr postings here on the site, but if you want to add me as a Contact or anything, here I am on Flickr.
For those of you looking for all my blog postings, tweets and Flickr updates all in one place, you might want to look at my FriendFeed page: For those (few) of you who might want to keep up with all the random goings on at Moore Consulting Towers, you can now follow me on Twitter: @wycombiensian.
I can’t promise I’ll be funny or insightful, but I can promise a pretty regular flow of tweets on web stuff, photography and anything else that takes my fancy.
You can see my recent Flickr postings here on the site, but if you want to add me as a Contact or anything, here I am on Flickr.
For those of you looking for all my blog postings, tweets and Flickr updates all in one place, you might want to look at my FriendFeed page:
A new approach for photographers’ websites - integrating Wordpress and Photoshelter
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
I’ve worked on several photographers’ sites (Chris Felver’s for example), and was always frustrated by the off-the-shelf solutions.
So either I built everything by hand (not so easy for the photographer to update themselves), or I was limited in how many text-based pages (news, blog, profile, articles, whatever) I could include.
But now I have a solution - integrating the Wordpress blogging tool and Photoshelter photographers’ archiving, display and sales service to create a dynamic site that looks consistent and makes it very easy for the photographer to upload and organize images and keep a blog going.
I’ve rebuilt my own photography site - Clearing the Vision - partly as an example of what can be done with this approach, and I’m very happy with the result.
End of Year Report
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
It’s been another successful and enjoyable year here at Moore Consulting Towers, and there’s just time for a quick round-up of what we’ve been up to this year.
New sites
It was great to build the new site for the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market. A really nice group of people, a fantastic event with really good long-term effects around the world.
Other new work included the site for law firm Harwood Consulting, and for creativity speakers and consultants Robert and Rebecca Bluestone (this in conjunction with Linda Johnson at Swell Design). Linda and I also worked together on the site for photographer Chris Felver.
Another notable new site was for the City of Santa Fe Economic Development team, where we worked with long-time collaborator Frank O’Mahony of NVNG, Inc.