bobshull.com gets a face lift and a complete overhaul.
Welcome to my new photography website and blog!
Finally after two years of talking about it I have finally forced myself to make the time and effort to re-develop my website.
Wow, I can finally breathe out a great sigh of relief and excitement!! This website has been a long overdue personal project for me. I've talked about doing this for a while now and it always seemed to be just out of reach with not enough time to devote to it. I must have started and stopped development a dozen times, not to mention scrapped many designs before finally deciding on this one. I think my biggest hang up was the design phase. I'm the type of person that works very well visually. And until I had the final vision of what this site was going to be I struggled with starting development.
The Old:
I developed my first photography site with one propose... a gallery to showcase my photography. While I liked the look and feel of the site, I soon realized that it was stale and didn't interact with my visitors at all. I displayed my photos and that was that.
The site was semi dynamic, but it was XML driven and had to be manually updated. This was OK at first, but I found myself getting lazy not updating as often as I should have.
The New:
I wanted a site that had a complete content manage solution, something exciting, something that brought user interaction and provided immediate feedback. I scoured the web looking for a "box" solution but found nothing that really fit my niche.
So what's a web developer to do?, stop being lazy and code it yourself! So that's just what I did.
What's new:
• Dynamic Blog Component
• Dynamic Photo Galleries
• Web Poll
• Latest content on Home Page
• Full RSS Feeds
• Allows commenting on photos and blog post
• Social Networking Sharing Component
• Full Content Management Solution
I've never really blogged before, and I debated building out this component, but at the end of the day, I think I'll really come to love this section.
I think that it will force me to think about photography more, and by writing about it, perhaps I'll even become a better photographer.
So, here it is... Let me know what you think!