A new structure for my website

As I told on my last post in 2007, Opera and Safari browsers were not rendering properly my pages. Moreover on the galleries pages there were still tables and the state of art of the web design literature suggests to avoid the use of the tables, moving to a fluid layout.

For that reason last winter I decided to rebuild my pages trying to optimize both technical and business aspects.

From a business point of view I've chosen Google Adsense and Amazon Associates programs and I've dedicated to these programs some spaces in almost each page of my website. Six main banners and two referral buttons are now present all around the main content, in order to give to the advertisers a place to attract their customers.

Another business innovation was the presence of my mother tongue (Italian) pages, with an Italian homepage and some information pages on Licensing Images, Fine Art Prints purchase and contact information.

From a technical side I basically moved from a table-based gallery to a list-based gallery in which the list items are the thumbnails. I added also two active icons: a magnifier and a shopping cart. The former gives to the user the opportunity to reach directly the slideshow page of the thumbnail and the latter is associated to a PHP function in order to access to a purchase page.

The length/width of the thumbnails was another technical problem I had to face with. I had to distinguish in vertical and horizontal ones.

This is due to the fact that CSS max-width/max-length property is not supported by Internet Explorer 6 and its previous versions. So I had to approach two different classes of thumbnails (vertical and horizontal thumbnails) with exactly the same attributes, except for the width/length that are obviously reversed.

Last technical innovations were the modifications to sibling/relative categories (below the search field) in order to give to the visitors a tool to surf easily through the site (jumping from a branch to another one of an hypothetical tree representing the website) and the slideshow counter, to show the number of slideshow page currently viewed.

Thanks to the siblings a visitor can surf on the website "as on a tree": for example if you are visiting Vermont Gallery you can use the "siblings path" to go "up" to the United States gallery (the parent), "down" to the children galleries (different Vermont slideshows) or to jump to the other galleries at the same level (i.e. some US states or collections).

This feature assures a better easiness for visitors and increases reachability of the site itself.

And If I migrate?

Just about two years!

Yes, two years ago I was introduced to Digital Photography and I realized that I was lucky! I was taking an opportunity to change my professional and personal life and to do a job regarding something that really I love: photography.

As I described in my biography I always have taken photos: for fun, for art, for everything. And everywhere, like everybody. Honestly speaking I don't know anybody that has never taken a photo during all life.

Photos are part of our life, our memory, and the way everybody chooses to tell stories or trip adventures, to describe a journey or to remember his parents, his children, his loves.

But photography as business is quite different. Migrating from a career to another one is not easy, especially in a country like Italy, very "conservative" from this point of view. But when I decided to try to do that I was not really "conscious" about how fascinating but also how difficult this challenge could be.

First of all it is "everything" except for … taking photos! Probably my previous experience as Project Manager is helping me in managing this business. For example it's helping me to realize my website. I confess a thing: when I was a student at Catania's University (TLC Engineering) I hated Programming and everything regarded with it. But the interest in developing a code for myself, something very important with me and with my activity as photographer, broke my barriers!

The fact is that we are in the Internet Age and if you want to do a widespread business you need a website. But if you know how to design a site probably you can turn it to you personal advantage. Because you perfectly know what you want from your site and you'll be responsible of your first means of communication.

Yes, a web site is above all your "business card", where you can put photos, reportages, articles, forms for mailing list, etc. So I learned how to design my website, how to write an HTML code, how to use CSS, how to manage a form with PHP and how to create dynamic slideshow using your dB tools.

Then you have to start-up your new business! Photography as a business? I told to myself, trying to understand if it is more an hobby than a business. Why not! Obviously I spend days and days shooting with a camera and optimizing photos with my computer. But a business is a business so I am also studiyng all business stuff! Market Analysis, marketing, promotion, database management, site management, business plan, budgeting, taxes, etc.

As a student of project management teachers usually do an example: you can play different roles in a project like someone who wears different colored hats.

The same now: photo shooting, site development, financial budget, dB management, all different features so different hats.

That's the most difficult part of this job: managing all in a effective and efficient way, "organizing" properly time and resources.