March 2, 2001

Almost ten years ago I launched new.jakegarn.com.

The WayBackMachine has been archiving the web, silently, like the biggest creep in the world for well over a decade now.  You can actually view my first website here… though it looks like the top left logo got screwed up… other than that it is exactly what the front page looked like on March 2nd, 2001.

Back then a photographer’s website was all about the galleries.  It was an era without Flckr, without facebook… and because of that your own website was really the only place to showcase your images.  Every photographer I knew had a similar style of site, eye-catching front page – a link to galleries, a link to contact info… that format has carried over for years and years and years.  It has become so ingrained in our heads that I’d say most photographers still follow that same format.

Starting a few years ago as blogs started to become more and more popular a lot of websites now provide a link to a separate photographer blog, keeping the same old gallery format on one page, and an regularly updated blog on another page.

Well, a couple years ago I hired a company called Bizlift to help me create a wordpress blog that was integrated with my website, a website that could be updated through the same wordpress admin screen as the blog.  This change allowed me to easily create new content.

I posted everything from lighting diagrams, stories, photoshop tutorials, before and after images and random test shoots.  The change seemed to be well received and my web traffic sky-rocketed… less than a month after launching I had the most traffic ever, thanks to a listing on www.stumbleupon.com one blog post received 25,000 unique visitors in a single day.

I used to design websites as a full time job, but this was the first time I hired someone to do all the HTML, integration and other programming which allowed me to concentrate on one thing, updating my gallery and blog posts.  This simple change on my website contributed to the increased amount of time I spent working on photoshoots and photography – in an odd way it sort of changed my life a bit.  I quickly had bizlift help create new blog-integrated websites for all my marketing clients (and my own restaurant).  I love them.

Well, over time I realized something.  I was still living in this world where I assumed the best way to setup my photography site was with an eye-catching front page, with a link to my gallery, blog (etc) up top… but the popularity of my blog, and the massive number of people that were actually viewing my images on other sites like facebook and deviantart meant that my website no longer needed to be a dedicated gallery.  By keeping the old format I was actually letting the navigation into my blog posts suffer, especially my older blog posts.

So I contacted my good friend Sterling at BizLift and we decided it was time for another change…

The star of my website is now getting it’s rightful place on my front page – my images blended with my thoughts on photography.  A website that now matches my shifting focus into reaching the world with more than just my photos.

With Sterling’s help this website was created within just a few days, a massive re-organization of existing blog content using an amazingly easy-to-use wordpress theme by Woo Themes.

I hope you enjoy… also, I look forward to refocusing my efforts on shooting and blogging.  Not a resolution for the New Year so much as a resolution for a new decade, a new era in how I think photographers will start to express and market themselves.