Jack Nichols Photography
Night sky and landscape photographer in Seattle, Washington
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Journal

My New Web Site

If you're a regular reader, you might have noticed a couple of changes! As you can see, I've re-done my web site, and I wanted to take a minute to explain what's new and why I've made a couple of changes.

Maintaining my web site is super time-consuming, but really worth it for me because it allows me to showcase my work on my own terms. I try to update it as often as I can with what I've been working on. More than that, it's just a great place for me to share pictures with all of you.

Lately, it's the time-consuming aspect that's been challenging, especially with a baby daughter! To get new pictures to you takes a considerable amount of time. Of course the pictures first have to be shot, then picked, then processed, and finally prepped and posted on the web. It's the last step of getting them on the web that's actually the most time consuming, for a couple of reasons:

  1. I post pictures in batch, along with a blog post. This means all of the pictures for a particular session need to be picked and processed, and I have to do the writeup before anything makes it to the web. The actual writing takes a ton of time too.
  2. I use a system that's very powerful but requires a little bit of tinkering. The workflow for getting new pictures even to my galleries is painfully slow.
  3. Related to #2, whenever I make design changes it takes a huge amount of time because I have to test in a bunch of different browsers, on my phone, etc. 

This new site addresses all of these issues, in a variety of different ways. You'll notice a few changes, I think for the better:

  1. I'll be sharing work a lot more frequently, because I won't be posting pictures in batch. Instead, I'll be sharing most new work to my Facebook, Instagram, 500px, Twitter, and Flickr pages, and posting the best to my galleries on a much more regular basis.
  2. Although writing individual blog posts takes a considerable amount of time, you have told me you love reading about what I'm up to, and I'll still do blogs about bigger shoots or adventures. The new site has a bunch of cool ways for me to tell rich, visual stories that I'm excited to play with! One change is that I won't do blog posts for smaller shoots, as often there isn't much in the way of words here, just pictures.
  3. Some of my archived blog posts aren't available here yet. Unfortunately I have to bring blog posts over manually from the old system, and I'll do that for some posts slowly over the next few months. If you have a post you're really missing, please let me know and I'll try to prioritize it.

Overall the net outcome here is more pictures, quicker for you and easier for me. I hope you'll agree it's an improvement.

My ask to you: if you aren't already doing so, please follow me on the social platform of your choice - it's where I'll post the most frequently:

As always, I'd love to hear your feedback!

 

 

Jack Nichols