JACK VEIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

Interested parties may want to know a bit more about how this web-site is designed, constructed and marketed. This page is for their benefit.

Design

Having done web-site production professionally, I know that a prime consideration for any web site is ease of maintenance. I didn't want to get trapped into producing a site where the upkeep costs would prevent me from continually expanding the contents of the site.

Rather than scratch build a web-site from the ground up, I have attempted to combine the functions of several different third party web-services, most notably in the area of content management.

Fundamentally, this has allowed me to create a sizeable site without having to code every single HTML page. I only grapple with the complexities of HTML and CSS to enforce a common look and feel across the various components of the site.

This approach has allowed me to build a fairly sizeable web-site that - once set up - is easy to maintain. Small compromises on navigation and look and feel have been made, but I have found it easier to live within a scheme that imposes a few constraints in return for considerable ease of maintenance.

I drew up the following diagram when designing the site, over a year ago:

Whilst I have yet to add a cafepress shop, it is quite pleasing to me how close my site is to its original concept.

There are only three components of the website that incur a small fixed fee, charged on an annual basis. The sites running costs are are very reasonable.

Build

• THE PORTFOLIO, provided by pbase, an excellent photo hosting resource and reasonably priced. Visitors are tracked and there is a comments book.
• THE WEBLOG/JOURNAL, provided by blogger, a free service. Visitor feedback is available through comments and if other blog writers link to me I can use a trackback mechanism to monitor this.
• THE PHOTOBLOG, feeding my WEBLOG, provided by flickr. I publish images samples to it and a variety of other photoblogs, including buzznet and textamerica
• .
• STATIC CONTENT, which doesn't fit into either my portfolio or blog, is hosted by fastmail, who also provide the sites e-mail account. In the static content section, visitor tracking is done by a free webstat counter.
• DETAILED VISITOR TRACKING, is done by addfreestats.com.

Promote

Regardless of how you go about promoting your website, feedback is crucial. By monitoring how many visitors you are getting and where they are coming from it is possible to finesse your marketing activities to achieve the most results.

My website routinely gets several thousand image downloads per day, which is pretty respectable traffic. Below are some of the efforts I have gone to achieve this:

• Samples of my work are posted to relevant online communities, blogs and photo-critique websites, with links back to my main site
• The images on my site and on the photo-blogs are indexed with relevant keywords that make the images searchable
• The images on my site are organized into galleries both by model and by theme. It is therefore possible to access the same image by several different routes.
• The links page, in the static content section, has been set up with link and banner exchange in mind.
• My blog is listed with a number of directories and is syndicated to allow subscription by a variety of means
• The visibility of my site to google and other search engines is checked
• A profile has been registered with relevant community websites. These profiles link back to my main website.
• Images are stamped with my sites URL as copy protection, which doubles as online advertisting.

Future Developments

In less than a year I have proven to myself that I can design and build a website that can be scaled up and is practical to maintain. I have also proven that I can attract visitors to it and get my pictures seen.

For now, the basic objective of the site will be to increase the size the portfolio to its capacity of several thousand pictures and to continue to post articles to my blog and built its readership up. I have now built up a "backlog" of shot material which has not been published, so this goal is very practical.

Whilst I haven't gone to the extent of doing it, I am confident that I could incorporate a pay-pal shopping cart if I decided to start selling prints and/or a cafepress or lulu store if I decided to sell derivative goods (e.g. calendars, T-shirts, mouse-mats) without having to massively change the site.

Mostly though, I am just happy to have a website that I know people are visiting and (hopefully) finding of interest.