Lightning Strike, Great Salt Lake, Utah
Welcome to the new home of Jeff Beck Photo. After much consideration, I’ve decided to completely update my website and move to a more elegant and powerful blogging platform. I’m now using squarespace’s Amélie blogging template.
One thing I discovered about this template is image galleries embedded in pages attached to the navigation don’t have the same functionality as galleries embedded in blog posts. Blog post image galleries have a lot more options. And, of course, I wanted the best looking galleries possible!
What’s missing is a gallery drop down menu and the ability to navigate to individual galleries from a list. At first I saw this as a drawback, but have come to embrace it for keeping the design streamlined. To work around the issue somewhat, I’ve used a category block on the sidebar that gives access to all galleries on the blog with one click. There’s no list, just the number of posts that have been categorized as galleries.
The cool part for me is how much control I have over the look and feel of my site without needing to know anything about code. I now have more control over the appearance of individual galleries as well as the option to add more detailed caption info to gallery images, and the ability to create richer and more visually appealing blog posts. Add to that, the ability for me to link my site with social media and allow readers/viewers to share my content, and you can bet I’m excited.
The biggest issue for me with this change is the loss of all the content I’ve published over the last four years. Thankfully, most of what I’ve written for my blog was done so in Microsoft Word rather than written directly in the blog interface.
Tip for all bloggers: compose your posts in your word processing software rather than your blogging software. I’m really glad I did that now, because even though I can’t transfer my blog directly from my previous platform to the new platform, I can at least repost most of what was on my original blog, which I plan to start doing shortly, in reverse chronological order I’m thinking.
So far, most of what I’ve done is post galleries of images. The galleries I’ve posted are even more tightly edited than my previous galleries and contain larger views of some of my classic images, as well as newer images, some never before published.
Please, scroll through my galleries, click on any thumbnail image for a larger view, and hover the mouse over the expanded image for caption info. Also, please check out my blog post Make Photographs About Something, which was never published on my previous site, so I know you haven’t read it.
Thanks for visiting Jeff Beck Photo!
