Huge Website Update
I've just finished making a massive update to this blog and to my photography portfolio. Let's take a look at what's different and what that means for the future!
Hello everyone! I wanted to share with you all the major overhaul I have just completed to my website. This is a huge update that's going to really open up new possibilities going forward!
A Bit of Background
Before we jump into everything that's shiny and new, I'd like to give some context to where the website stood previously.
I've had a photography website/blog in one form or another since around 2013. Eventually, around 2015, I finally decided to start taking things a bit more seriously and registered the domain SerialPhotog.com. If you're wondering why my username on pretty much every platform is @serialphotog, now you know!
I operated things under the Serial Photog brand for a while until I finally decided to switch to the current branding of Adam Thompson Photography a few years ago. From that time forward, both my blog and photography portfolio have lived on the same platform. Initially, that platform was WordPress, and then, more recently, it was Squarespace.
Both had pros and cons, and both could manage to get the job done, but they both also severely lacked blogging capabilities or the ability to manage a photography portfolio (in all honesty, Squarespace leaves a lot to be desired in both areas).
That's what led me down the rabbit hole of separating out the blog and photography portfolios.
The New Setup
The first thing you might notice is that this blog is now separate from the main photography site. My photography portfolio continues to live at AdamThompsonPhoto.com, but this blog is now located at Blog.AdamThompsonPhoto.com. This decision allows me to easily host both on different platforms.
The New Blog
The blog now runs on Ghost. The original content has been moved over, so nothing should be missing.
After spending a lot of time experimenting with the available solutions, I determined that Ghost is by far the best available blogging platform. It allows me to avoid the needlessly long rabbit hole of creating something from scratch myself, and it also gives me a bunch of extra features.
One of the nicest things about Ghost is that it combines my blog and newsletter into the same platform. This will make everything much easier for me to manage. It also makes it super easy for me to create "members only" content that can be locked to only email subscribers or, in the future, to paying members. While I'm not currently using the paid tiers feature, I have some ideas of how those could be useful in the future!
The other thing I love about Ghost is that it's easy for me to organize the content so that it's easier to find. For example, I now have a dedicated page to help you find posts by state. Oh, and did I mention that the search is super fast?
The Photography Portfolio
So, what about my portfolio, you ask? Well, I decided to go with the tried-and-true solution of using SmugMug. I somewhat stubbornly avoided SmugMug for years, and there are still plenty of things I can gripe about with it, but it's still one of the better options for setting up an easy-to-manage portfolio. Maybe one of these days I'll create a better, custom solution, but that day is not today!
The portfolio is arranged into galleries, similar to the old one. One big change, however, is that there is now a lot more organization. For example, my Kentucky gallery, which has a ton of content, is now further divided into sub-categories to make it easier to find what you're looking for.
The last thing that I'm really excited about with this move to SmugMug is that it's going to make it super easy for me to set up a print store again, something that quite a few people have been asking me about lately. I'm not quite finished getting that ready to go, but I expect to have it rolled out very soon!
What's Next
I've been saying for a while that there's a lot more that I want to do with this blog. Until now, it has felt like I've been spending most of my time fighting the platform rather than creating new content. With this new setup, I can finally start making new content without it feeling like a constant battle.
Additionally, it's now way easier for me to manage and update the galleries on my portfolio. As such, I intend to start slowly adding new, never-before-released work after I finish getting the print store up and running.
Long story short, expect new stuff coming out soon!
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