A Quick Website Update
I’ve been a bit remiss in posting over the past two weeks, and that’s because I’ve been preoccupied with a little side project. For the longest time now, I have not been happy with my website(s). My photography web presence is basically split into two parts. There’s this one, which is my “gear and news” blog and then my portfolio site, which also has my (mostly) gear free “ pure photography” blog. Ive hosted these on Squarespace for years now, but I’ve been increasingly frustrated by the way the sites work, and by Squarespace in general. Unfortunately moving platforms isn’t really a viable option as the sites, particularly this one, are too big to easily move. With that in mind, I’ve set about trying to update them within the confines of the current host.
Why do I have two websites?
You may be wondering why I have two separate websites in the first place? Originally it was because I wanted to be able to do a full with blog for my pure photography posts and have a sidebar for the more gear/news/tutorial type posts. You can’t do this on a post by post basis in Squarespace, so the only option was to have two separate websites. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it’s become something of a pain in the you know what. There was also a sort of philosophy years ago that having multiple sites, all cross linking could help your search ranking, but that’s not true any more and possibly even hurts it. I don’t know, I’m not an expert in these things.
It does allow a degree of flexibility though, as I can tinker with one without affecting the other. It also allows me to tailor the design to the “pure photography” blog to optimise for the photo essay type posts I do there, but the rest of the site was getting neglected, especially the portfolio. So I’ve set about trying to update it to address the shortcomings.
Two step process
The update will be a two step process. The first thing I did was change the theme to more closely match the one from this blog. The newer theme also allows me a bit more flexibility when it comes to the gallery and portfolio displays. But this is only the first step. If you’ve never used squarespace, this won’t really mean anything, but my current sites are running on Squarespace 7.0 which is their older system. I want to update to 7.1 which has a lot of new features, but is also quite different, and the first step in this process was choosing a compatible theme. The second step is actually upgrading, which isn’t that straight forward as a lot of features are different and it can seriously affect the current design and layout.
Luckily they have a way to test this, and so I’ve duplicated my portfolio site and I’ve been running tests on a hidden test version running 7.1. It’s still not perfect, but I’m nearly ready to do it to the live site. It should give me better options once it’s finished and allow me to put more of a focus on my actual photography. It is still limited because you can only do what Squarespace wants you to do, and there’s no easy way to make modifications like you could with Wordpress or a HTML site, but 7.1 does give you more flexibility.
The Future
Once I have my portfolio site finished, I’ll try and tackle this one. I’m not sure this will be able to be updated to 7.1 as it has so many hacks and other things to make it work. It may be that I’m stuck with it as it is, but you never know! I will try though.
Going forward, I kind of worry about the long term viability of websites in general. With AI slowly killing google searches, and therefore also killing any website that needs search to drive traffic, I’m not sure how long the open web has. You also have the problem of AI stealing your content. If you search for a tutorial on something and the AI search engine tells you everything that’s in the tutorial, people aren’t going to go to your site. What’s worse is that half of the time, the AI version is wrong, so your traffic is being destroyed just to give people the wrong information. Good times.
Anyway, no point in going down that rabbit hole. Maybe in a future post.
So that’s why my updates have been slow these past two week. I do have a list of posts and videos I want to write and make, so I’ll be back to it soon. Oh, and check out the intermediate re-design of my portfolio site in the meantime. The fully finished reboot should be live next week, although you may see some broken design in the mean time as I have to make the 7.1 update live before I can fix the issues upgrading causes.
