Over the weekend I rolled in some changes to the site, including an updated front page. I’ve been spending the last few months trying to figure out what this site needed to be about — or whether it was time to just shut it down and do something else.
“Chuqui 3.0″ is retired, thank god. That was then, I stuck with it far too long, mostly because I wasn’t sure what came next.
I’ve felt for a while that the blog has been sort of on idle. I haven’t really committed to writing for it consistently and when I have written, I haven’t felt like I’ve been putting my best effort or content out. The same has been true of my photography. For a while, that was okay; I wasn’t trying to turn this into anything specific or generate an income stream, and honestly, it more or less matched life in general. There are times when you need to just back off and tell yourself it’s okay to coast and not worry about it.
It’s time to start pushing myself again, figuring out what I want to focus on over the next few years, and make it happen. The question was, what?
That turned out to be a difficult question to answer. Over the last year, I’ve been researching whether or not to jump back into my fiction writing, which I’d put on hold “for a while” about 20 years ago. With the ebook revolution going on, there are definitely market opportunities that weren’t there five years ago.
Or do I jump back into the mobile space? It’s sometimes hard to remember that I went to work for Palm because there were apps I wanted to write and things I wanted to explore on mobile devices, but I’ve now been away from that circus for a while and that’s been tugging at my attention again.
A discussion of why I made the choices I did might happen some other time, but at least for now, what I’ve decided to do is put the focus back on my photography and to finally invest the time into the blog and the site to make it do what I’ve always wanted it to do, but never was willing to invest in.
This weekend’s update isn’t “the new blog”, but the new front page. There’s still a lot of work needed, but to get to this point meant making a huge number of decisions, both about design, and content and intent. The two big criticisms I had about the site were that it wasn’t really about anything (it was just a holding place for stuff I stuck on it) and that the design was cluttered and sloppy.
It is time to fix that. Laurie offered to design the logo, and I think she did an awesome job on it. The logo really defines the direction I’m setting out on: at my core, I’m a photographer, and at the core of my photography are birds and nature. The last time I re-did the site, I split the focus of the site between my photography and the blog, and the result was a cluttered mess (toss in affiliate advertising and various other gadgets and things and blocks and toys, and when you end up with is fail).
So, the new front page. It’s all about my imagery. If you come to me site, that’s what you see. I’m working on an updated blog page that will focus on the blog and try to do justice to the words the way I hope the front page sets the stage for the images.
The three pages that will be the foundation for the site will be the front page, the blog page and the portfolio page. One down, one partially done. Just starting to hash out how I want to display images in a non-sucky way. I don’t think I do a bad job of it, but I’b not really doing a great job. I’m tired of okay-for-now-someday. I’ve made a few changes on the blog side — the new text font is Libre Baskerville, which I quite like — but there’s still work to do. I realize some will think I should just hold everything and do a “big splash” update all at once; my view is the iteration over time will let both you and myself benefit as I figure this out, and I expect I’ll be spending time over the next few months working through all of the details.
About the Front Page
The front page of the site sets the tone and style for everything else. It’s got a unique look and feel that won’t be matched by the other pages, but the rest of the site will borrow from the decisions I made building it as I build them out as well. The goals were straightforward: nuke the baby blue for something a lot whiter and neutral (but it’s not white; there’s still the barest touch of blue in it). Clear out the clutter and anything that wasn’t directly about me (like the affiate advertising), and make it very crisp and clear what the site is about.
The blog page will complicate that message again — the blog is not JUST photography, but basically the current content mix — but the front page needs to keep it simple.
The new tag line for the site is “Stories Told Here“. A very simple statement, but you don’t want to know how many hours of my life I spent figuring that out. Photography long ago stopped being about showing up at a place, grabbing a random shot and posting it. It’s about understanding a place, and finding a way through my work to see it and feel it and understand it. It’s one thing for me to take a picture of a flock of geese flying, and it’s another thing altogether to be there as 20,000 geese all take off and fly around and over you, screaming their freaking heads off.
That’s part of where I’m trying to push my work. It’s not just taking that “icon shot” as it is trying to create a context to help all of you understand and appreciate what caused me to photograph it. That is going to involve more than displaying a picture, and I’ve started experimenting with both longer form works (writing and pictures, and collections of pictures) and other techniques such as including audio or video. As my abilities to integrate this stuff mature, hopefully what I’m seeing in my head will make sense to you and help you see things as I saw them (and if not, well, I’ll try something else).
It’s not about taking a picture, or posting it online. It’s about telling a story.
A story of a place, or a thing, or a being.
And that journey — or this leg of that journey — starts now. Enjoy the ride.