Announcing the new!improved! chuqui.com

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve just released a new design for my blog and the chuqui.com site. After 3+ years of living with the old design, I was long overdue for a refresh, and I’m quite happy with the result.

I’ve been researching this refresh for a couple of months as part of a larger look at whether I felt it was time to take the next step towards shifting my photography towards my goal of going pro — in fact the short answer for that is no, because I don’t want to take the time and energy away from the photography to work on the business, and there really isn’t any overriding reason why I should now (there’s a longer version of that answer, but it’ll have to wait for another time).

Goals for the redesign

Coming out of that research I came up with some goals for this new design. I felt my old site had a number of problems, it wasn’t a good design to show off photography, the design in general seemed dated, having the entry page also be the front page of the blog limited my flexibility, there really wasn’t a good way to integrate in other things I do or create ways to help people find the other places I’m active or connect with my via social media, and the old site had the remains of at least three previous blog designs and none of that content had ever been cleaned up or properly integrated into the site, leaving me with what can be described charitably as a chaotic mess with a horrifically bad taxonomy.

I decided if I was going to fix this, it was time to fix it right, and not just layer a new pretty theme on top of eleven years of blogging crap, so I did.

The new design

The new design uses the Clean Modern Simple theme, available from Themeforest. I spent a lot of time thinknig over what I wanted and ended up choosing a premium theme because it was well worth a few dollars to not spend tens of hours creating my own from scratch (although the geek in me wanted to). I chose it because it was light, open and modern looking, not heavily ornamented, and it seemed to present photographs pretty well but was still a good design for text-oriented material. That latter was a problem with many photoblog themes that seemed to presume only visual content and for more traditional blog themes that really didn’t handle large imagery well. This one does both without any significant compromises, which I like.

I expected to do some customization to the theme, but in fact I ended up making only two changes: I swapped out the front page image area with a gallery system from my smugmug account that will dynamically pull from my portfolio for images, and I wasn’t completely happy with how widgets laid out on the front page so I tweaked it so that the three columns all flowed separately so I could better control the look of the page. All in all, that was a very minor change.

I set up a custom front page that is designed to bring all of my activities together — not just the blog, but my photography, my various social media outposts and the other places where I create content like Google Buzz and Twitter. If you view the front page of the site as your “business card” — which makes sense if you think about that URL being the one most likely on your card that you hand out as a “drop me a line” contact — then I think this new front page does a good job of showing who I am and what I do while creating opportunities to connect and interact. It creates easy access for my two photographic activity points (flickr and smugmug) and provides easy ways to locate my blog and my social networking hotspots as well as aggregating some interesting content back from them so people get a sense of what’s there and why it might interest them.

My assumption is someone arrives at the front page of my domain because they were given the URL and are looking for something — a way to contact me, one of my photos, something. The front page is designed to make it easy for them to find whatever they came to the site for if they didn’t have a deep link directly to it, while also maybe encouraging them to check out some of the other stuff I do.

In researching blog/site designs and deciding what worked on other blogs and digging through the analytics on my site to see what worked and what (most of it) didn’t, it became obvious that visitors to a site generally do not explore it. They hit a link, they browse whatever is on that link, and they leave. The implication of that is that if there are other things you want to get them interested in, they have to be there on the page when they arrive. I’ve tried to create sidebar designs for different types of pages that reflect that. By splitting the blog front page from the site front page I can target them diffferently. The blog has the pointers to the archives and category pages (useful mostly to make sure the detail pages exist to the search engines) — which means I do not need to give up page space on the front page for those items. I also made a decision not to ppush any photo links or galleries on the blog page to keep it from getting too cluttered; there’ll be images in the blog entries and if that interests someone it’ll be easy enough for them to switch off and explore.  Same rationale for the blog detail page and the supplementary pages (about, contact) and the photography page, although on the latter, I added in two small galleries to give visitors a jumping off point to my photo sites.

The RSS feed is a full feed. The politics of full vs. partial is it’s own extended discussion; suffice it to say I’m not trying to force people to generate revenue by forcing them to come to my site to be forced to see advertising, so I see zero advantage in partial feeds for my situation. And since I’m now explicitly using a Creative Commons license on the site that removes the other reason not to do full feeds; in reality, the pirates will do what they damn well want anyway, so gutting functionality to stop them is a stupid tactic, and given these choices this made sense.

Advertising and Revenue

My old design had Adsense advertising on it, which did very poorly, and I occasionally experimented with Amazon affiliate links that did surprisingly well given how rarely I used them and how little work I did to promote them. It’s my opinion that Adsense works better when your audience is a non-technical crowd (i.e. “my mom”) and since my audience is heavily skewed to high-tech and photography types, it’s not a good match. I won’t miss it, and I won’t waste screen space on something that performs badly for me.

One of the things I argued with myself a lot over was just what my proposed revenue model was. Was it trying to create content that I generate revenue with on advertising? Or is my site about me creating things that have value that I can sell? In my view, it’s very hard to do both at the same time: if the purpose of the site is to sell my images or to sell what I do, then advertising distracts from and dilutes that and confuses the message.

My long term plan is to create content and imagery that people want, and then sell them products based on that. Because of that, I’ve taken a very low profile on advertising. Doesn’t mean I won’t take on a sponsorship or sell advertising if the right situation happens, but I’m not pursuing it or encouraging it and I don’t expect it to be a focus down the road.

My long term revenue potential right now looks to have two aspects:

• Photography: The industry is still in the midst of a major transformation because of the online and digital revolutions. Some traditional revenue forms (like stock) have been devastated and aren’t coming back — or more correctly, will stabilize in some new form that will benefit some but many that depended on it will have to adapt. I’m waiting and seeing before trying to step in here. But I still think that there is a continuing market for quality images for both licensing and through prints, and so I continue to work to refine my craft to allow me to enter those markets.
• Writing: I think there’s a fascinating future shaping up here in ebooks and in writing. There’s a transformation just starting towards the electronic book (thanks in large part to the iPad, but also to people like Tim O’Reilly who has been fostering this form for years with things like his Safari Bookshelf); we’re just starting to see a revenue market and a mainstream audience being created for this form. I’m particularly taken by what David duChemin is doing with this in his Craft and Vision line of books, and I think there’s a lot of potential in the “short form” inexpensive ebook that he’s championing.

It takes a long time to write and produce and publish a 300 page traditional photography book that costs the consumer $40 and may be obsolete with the release of one key piece of software; that’s a main reason why I’ve never gotten into computer book writing, even though I’ve had opportunities.  I do think there is a definite market for these traditional books in electronic form, both instructional and visual, and I’ve spent a couple of evenings with some of the work of William Neill who’s published three of his classic imagery books electronically, and I think that form works well. How it’ll make the transition and be priced and whether it’ll transform, I don’t know (but I believe so, and again, I think you’ll see a move to the shorter, less expensive form that is more of an impulse buy and easier/faster to produce. We’ll see.

The short form ebook at an accessible price looks like a great opportunity here. If you haven’t read any of duChemin’s books, they’re well worth the $5 just to see how he’s experimenting with the form. The iPad and the Kindle and other e-readers and the emerging market that is just starting to emerge for “consumption-oriented” devices like tablets or slates will accelerate this, and it’s definitely something I think has potential and I want to foster.

Needless to say, there are synergies possible between those two, and I also think that good imagery and well-written content on a nicely built site can help create opportunities to write for other venues down the road.

I am not a huge fan of online advertising as the core of a revenue model; the internet is littered with sites who are so desperate for every ad dollar that they abuse their readers in search of any revenue they can get. I am not a fan of sites that hold my eyeballs hostage and make me jump through 30 hoops to see their content — and in most cases, I leave without actually seeing it and rarely come back. I’m also not a fan of sites that load themselves up with every possible ad and every possible sponsorship and end up looking like cheap callgirls in a biker bar looking for some action, and I think ultimately people view the content on those sites that way, and I think my content and my audience deserves better. So I’m happy to not have to go down that path, and I hope that never changes.

Other stuff that finally got fixed

As I went over the old blog, I realized I really needed to fix some things. There was a lot of crap content in it, from the days I was convinced it was better to post content free messages than not post, so there was a lot of two-line postings, and a huge number of them had broken links to whatever I was originally pointing to. There was also a lot of — crap — that I just didn’t want to have published on my site any more, because it was simply irrelevant, uninteresting or no longer reflected a position I wanted to reflect. The old screwed up categorization and taxonomy needed fixing, too, badly. over 2/3 of the messages posted to the blog were sitting in an “uncategorized” category feeling bored and unloved.

So I did. I read every posting in the blog, all 2,600 of the 11 year history of my blogging past. And I deleted the crap and I restructured the categorization and I fixed the links and I polished the brass and I painted the trim, and now, honestly, I feel like the content might actually be interesting and useful. It can be tempting to edit history, of course, and I don’t promise that I did NONE of that, but my focus was on preserving the message that including significant material by me, and I was a lot less interested in keeping a post from four years ago that included a link to some random internet meme and a message from me that said “funny”. I think the universe is a better place for this editing.

And a fair amount of editing it was – about 40% of the messages in the blog went away, but maybe 25% of the content, and none of it will be missed. I’ve spent some time analyzing how people visit my old site, and to be honest, 95% of the visits went to the home page or to about 5% of the pages, and 75% of the pages got visited zero times in about 9 months of data.

Moving forward

It was interesting going back and reading what I was thinking along the way, especially given my view of those years and how I see things today. Most on that some other time. And it was interesting to dig into the details of the last design and see just how — unsure and chaotic — it was. Lots of stubs I never filled in, lots of mixed messaging, lots of confused thoughts and frankly, a pretty poor design. I intended at the time for it to be a relatively temporary placeholderr. I didn’t expect it to be three years to finally deal with it. In all honestly, it fairly represented what was going on in my head and life at the time, and no, that wasn’t a necessarily a fun and happy place to be.

But now I’m feeling healthy for the first time in a while, life is going pretty well, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand what I want to do and where I want to go; when I left Apple it wasn’t on a real positive vibe and it showed. Now I understand things a lot better, and I think that’ll show, too. So since the 5th is my birthday (#52), I decided to give myself a present, and one I want to share with all of you. And so, a couple of hundred hours of sweat equity later, here it is.

Let me know what you think, and let me know what you think it could be. I’m all ears and open to your ideas as well as mine…

And thanks for reading this stuff. There are a lot of voices and a lot of sources out on the net. I’m thrilled to know some of you think mine is worth investing some time and energy in.

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