Surprise! I changed my website! My old website (see above) hasn’t changed much in at least a couple of years. It was a lot of work to maintain. The old site was also getting expensive to just serve as a portfolio for my work and store front for my prints.
What’s new? Technically everything. I moved from having my own web host where I was in full control of the HTML to something I’m less in control of. My old site was built on WordPress, using a template from a company that has gone out of business and hasn’t offered any form of updates in over a year. I am giving SquareSpace a shot with my website. Yes, that SquareSpace that sponsors every single YouTube video.
So far, setting up a site was easy with plenty of modern templates to choose from. My only frustration is that some templates lock their photo galleries into one style/mode for showing images. It’s not obvious which ones do or don’t. The first template I selected was one of them. Galleries were stuck in a stacked order with full-sized images. Viewing my work would have been forever scrolling and tall photos didn’t fit on screen without scrolling. That would not have represented my work well nor would it have been a good user experience.
The good news is that it was easy to move the work I had already done to a new template. I did have to delete some content that came with the new template and drag the content from the previous template into the new one, but it wasn’t difficult. Not everything could be replicated from the first template though. For instance, the template I initially chose used image tiles that clicked into image galleries as the home page. I could not do this on the template I settled on. If I had one complaint with SquareSpace so far, it’s the fact templates are not consistent in their functions.
Please feel free to explore the new site and let me know what you think. If you’re familiar with my previous site, let me know what’s missing. I will likely still be making changes, but hopefully more so behind the scenes.