OUT WITH THE OLD ~ IN WITH THE NEW

In so many ways, the title of this post says it all.

For the past few months, I’ve thought about how I could make my studio’s online presence more effective. In the past, I did not enjoy having my clients visit the blog for updates and to see when their photos would be posted and then send them to my website for viewing their proofs. The different appearance of both tools was bothersome to me. I had spend a lot of time with first the website and then the blog to try to pull them together, but it didn’t work for me any longer.

My blog is created with a wonderful company, ProPhoto, and recently they have come up with some very cool templates. My website and mail had been with Bludomain, a company that has treated me well for years, but I have outgrown them. The main issue I had with hosting with them was that was that if I continued hosting with them I would run out of space on their server. I was constantly on the edge of crashing my website and I would have to limit posting on my blog and clamp down further on client proofing. This winter I decided it was a no brainer, it was time to move on and I had to first switch hosting companies.

I decided on Bluehost. First contact with them was awesome, they actually have live phone support. No more sending an email and waiting, sometimes for days to get a reply or an answer from Bludomain. I signed up and started building this new blog. It looked different at first while I tried out different templates and colors. I eventually decided that I wanted to keep some of the design elements I’ve been using and slowly update and revitalize them. However, I had so many images to transfer from one host the the other. The concept was to build this site temporarily while I remained online with bludomain. The options looked good and Matt at ProPhoto began the arduous process of moving the blog content. Days passed and it failed. He had to start over. Eventually, all of the content was copied to the new location.

I decided that once I almost had it designed the way I wanted it, I would notify bludomain that I needed a release from their hosting, renew my domains and start the official move to bluehost. Then, a seven day period occurs, while the internet ‘transfers’, ‘points’, ‘directs’, ‘moves’… all these words that seemed frightening to me.

I decided a few weeks ago that it was time to do it, approved the transfer process and I waited. While that was occurring, I changed my mind about the ‘look’ of the blog, of course and got to work on what you see now. I waited. And waited.  Day seven occurred, my old blog went dead, a message appeared about the ‘brand spankin’ new blog and I went on the admin section of the blog and my hundreds if not thousands of photos were gone. They didn’t make it to the new site. I can’t begin to tell you what that period was like while these two companies who have no phone support needed information from one another and I had to be the middle person. The issue could have been fixed in ten minutes but it took almost two weeks. That’s why I always say, ‘pick up the phone and call if you really want action’.

Panic?  Yes. After a two week period of worry and hard work, Matt came to the rescue and the images were found. He’s a big man to admit that he had made a mistake the first time, but, all is good now and here we are.

THE NEW BLOGSITE   |   WHAT IS IT?

Here, you will be able to view everything you want. You can read the blog, search for old posts, type in any word (or your name) in the search area and a grid of posts will show up. You can hover over the thumbnails to read the first sentence of the post and to view the photos. One thing that is not worked out yet is if I able to crop the photos in the thumbnails so you can see faces and not cut off heads. I might just have to deal with that for now.

You can link a post to facebook, you can share a post to facebook, you can make comments, pin to pinterest, email a post to a friend… this is fun!

On the tabs above, you can find all the information you need about senior portrait, family, corporate sessions. You can read about Riley and about why you would want to hire me, (About- Behind the lens), view galleries of seniors, corporate head shots, informal portraits, street work, kids and families. Also available are galleries of my Fine Art Work. Those galleries will continue to grow as I add images. This is a work in progress as I have years of images to go through. The images there will be available for prints in two sizes and framing is available now at Janet Wolbarst Photography.

That’s it for now. Next up:  what else is new here | kitchen renovation | studio organization | new dressing room and bathroom | 23 lbs lost … | loving this winter…

Stay tuned and have a great day!