Changes... they are a-coming

I’ve spent much most of the holiday time rethinking and reworking my web presence, such as it is, including this blog, my website portfolio, Flickr, and Twitter. They were a collective mess, really—no integration and, at least in presentation, little to separate them from the already crowed field. So, changes… they are a-coming.

For today, I’m unveiling the beta of my new blog. No, it’s not on Blogger: I wanted a platform and an interface that offered more flexibility than Blogger.

Among many other things, I wanted multiple pages, and I wanted to be able to make those pages look different from other pages on the same site. And I wanted an interface that afforded rapid prototyping as well as line-level coding changes. I also wanted to offer both public and limited-access content. And of course I wanted a robust, scalable platform that would allow me to import all my Blogger content and to backup that content to an industry-standard XML formatted file.

There are many great blogging platforms out there besides Blogger, including WordPress and Moveable Type as well as their hosted variations wordpress.com and typepad.com. But what I ended up not wanting was a self-hosted site. While we all promise to say our prayers and back up our data, the reality is that we don’t. So placing the safety of redundancy on someone else’s shoulders became a requirement for me.

So what did I choose? Squarespace. It met all of my requirements and then some. But as many of you may know, Squarespace is not free, and since we are all now addicted accustomed to free, that’s something many will find hard to swallow. But there is a benefit: They are in business to serve their customers and not to sell ads. That is a refreshing concept. And their service thus far has been stellar.

Finally, I wanted a site that would be fun to look at without compromising the readability of the post. Please visit my new blog site and leave a comment letting me know if my goals were achieved.

The new blog URL will change after I map my domain name, but for the time being, you can see it here.

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Today’s image: Danielle, lit with a small softbox at camera right, a small umbrella for fill just left of camera, and a shoe-mount strobe above and slightly behind her.

Comments

[Lin]

Nice presentation, Will. Very nice...I might use Squarespace myself in the future

[WillT]

From Twitter, 9:22 PM Jan 5th:
Marcotte Really like your new site layout. It's very elegant and suits your photography and words very well. Happy New Year!