Sunrise – Mt Erie

Greetings,

Welcome to my new website. It has been a very long time since I last updated the design of my photography website. The previous version was created in DreamWeaver more than a dozen years ago and was basically a set of static pages and galleries. Since then there have been a lot of changes in web design. Two of the new options that interested me were animations and responsive page designs. I decided to create my new site in WordPress since I have used it on other sites I have been webmaster on and like the interface. There are also a lot of predefined themes available.

I chose a paid theme designed for photographers from PremiumCoding.com called LandScape. Unfortunately, this has been the most frustrating web development project I have ever worked on. The documentation for the theme is not particularly detailed but the biggest problems were with the two main plug-ins the theme uses: Revolution Slider and Essential Grid. Both of these are big selling plug-ins with generally good reviews. I found the documentation to be really poor for both. Worse still was the fact that Revolution simply does not work correctly. The whole effort required a lot of trial and error and brute force to get the website up and running.

I am happy to say the site is now up and running. I am still chasing down some performance problems, particularly with the responsive behavior on cell phones. I hope to resolve these issues soon. Also, I have thus far only loaded eight photos per gallery in each category. I will be loading a lot more content in the next few weeks. I plan to write periodic blog posts with information on what and where I have been shooting and any other interesting photography topics I feel like commenting on.

I hope you enjoy my new site. If you have any questions or comment please drop me a line. I’m always happy to discuss photography.

Mike Stoy