If you don’t know Nathan’s work then I recommend you check him out, he’s got some crazy good photography skills. In fact it’s also worth reading this interview with him on photographywired which was posted a little while back. I’m lucky enough to know Nathan personally and I’ve had the pleasure of hangin’ with him and his homies on a few occasions. Through various conversations about problems with his old site I ended up with the opportunity to give his site a makeover and I have to say I’m pleased with the results.

Nathan has worked in the design industry for quite some time so compared to most other people I’ve worked on websites for he had a very clear vision of how he wanted his site to look visually (and that was both refreshing and at times challenging ). He also wanted something which he could easily update which was not where he was at with his current set-up which was purely a flash based gallery.

If I’d tackled this project a year ago I would most certainly of used drupal, but since using wordpress for photographywired I’ve been surprised and impressed by it’s versatility. I don’t want or need to get into which system is better but I think in this instance where a blog was going to be a major part of the project and I wasn’t having to deal with large amounts of site members and community functionality then wordpress seemed like a better choice and I knew it has a nice easy to use back end for posting straight out of the box.

I guess the biggest challenges were both theming the site and coding the portfolio sections. The theme was challenging from the point of view that I needed to implement a single wordpress installation but have a very separate blog and portfolio style. Luckily this can actually be achieved relatively easily in wordpress using the page templating system and conditional template tags. I learnt a lot of stuff about themes and wordpress that I didn’t know previously during this project but that’s one of the reasons for taking something like this on!

Nathan was keen that the portfolio would be very similar to his old site in that it would be completely stripped back to basics with plenty of white space to allow the images to speak for themselves. This actually was quite a long process as it’s surprising how much stuff we had to chuck out to get to that level of minimalism, we also spent some considerable time adding a bit of fluidity to the portfolio section so that it still displayed images and thumbnails at various screen resolutions. This was much more challenging than I envisaged when taking into account several browser types. The blog is kind of a polar opposite with lots of personality and clutter but also brought its own challenges in placing various background elements and images and keeping it xhtml valid. Nathan also got me to add a few easter eggs in the blog area which are well worth hunting for!

Coding the site was relatively straight forward with most of the site functionality being taken care of by available plugins straight out of the box with just basic configuration needed. Some stuff though was a bit more complex. Once again the process of stripping down and simplifying the gallery plugins and flash plugins and putting them back together again so that they fitted purpose was very time consuming and Nathan threw a few curve balls my way which I still managed to sort out fairly quickly (random images and no thumbs on home page and the ability to link to specific images in flash gallery amongst them). The result though is a fairly slick back end which offers Nathan the ability to manage his portfolio really easily without needing a degree in computer science.

In fact the workflow is pretty lean especially when you consider he now has the ability to manage all of his images on the fly from the same wordpress dashboard which he uses to update his blog posts and other static pages. I also spent some time tinkering with the user roles in wordpress so that Nathan can set up private galleries for clients for image proofing without compromising the security of the rest of his site. All this is tucked in behind a nicely themed user login interface.

I think Nathan is pleased with the site and I’m certainly proud of my accomplishments. It was really a team effort though with both myself and Nathan putting in some pretty late night work with phone conversations and live edit sessions taking place over the internet…. crazy sleep deprived goodness! well worth it!! we got the whole thing done in about 3-4 weeks whilst still holding down the day jobs which isn’t bad going. This includes the more standard stuff also such as SEO, XHTML validation, setting up feeds, backup management, spam protection etc etc.

If you have a cool web site project that you think would be right up my street, get my creative juices pumping, and your willing to part with some cash to get me involved then please get in touch.

Photographywired.com was a personal project to give myself and fellow photographer Paul Broome an outlet to blog about our passion for photography. It was important that the design was simple but attractive. We harnessed wordpress and it’s ability to have multiple authors to make the site feel like it had different voices and opinions. I also played on this with the profiles pages and individual flickr feeds  that feature on the sites home page.

I  set up a unique twitter account and flickr group for the site that have both served really well in pulling traffic to the site and encouraging participation from the readers of the site in addition to standard features such as offering an RSS feed. Initially the site was setup with some affiliate advertising and google adsense areas but it was decided that generating revenue was not as important as the content and positive feedback from visitors. I pulled the advertising as it was seen to be distracting and a burden to administer.

The biggest challenge with this site has been keeping updated and fresh content when both of the contributors are busy on other projects. To that end the site will be reviewed and possibly more authors added.