A Change of Venue

Longer Version

A couple of days ago I put up a very short post stating that this blog was being discontinued. This will be a slightly more filled out version of that announcement.

The Minimalist Photographer blog will continue on at http://theminimalistphotographer.com/blog albeit in a slightly different way. The posts will be more text oriented and more like ‘traditional’ blog posts if there is such a thing. By that I mean that rather than just an image or an image and a couple of sentences these will be more like short essays geared to help others. I am looking to post once or twice a week as opposed to multiple times a day.

This brings us on to images and this is where it gets good – at least in my opinion. My biggest problem with this current site was the inability to display images well – I never found a solution that I liked. The click on the small image to get a bigger image on a plain white background was always a bad compromise. Well, that problem has now been solved spectacularly on the new site – images are displayed in all of their glory with large slideshows, big thumbnails, darkened backgrounds etc. If you have seen something on a photography site that you’ve liked this site probably does it.

Just in case anyone is interested the new site is hosted by Zenfolio who specialize in photography and image sites. I spent a lot of time looking at what Zenfolio, and the other big player in the niche, Smugmug had to offer. I cannot speak to Smugmug but I am very pleased that I made the choice I did. I wanted a solution that most importantly, displayed images beautifully but also came with a full shopping cart and the ability to offer both prints and electronic downloads and that didn’t carry obvious third party branding. Being able to use my own domain name was also very important. I was expecting and willing to pay several hundred dollars a year to do this right – the Zenfolio solution is costing me $120 a year. If you are a photographer looking for a web presence this could be the way to go. This code: RAP-TS9-3FG will save you 10% on the price of any package from Zenfolio. They offer different packages from around $30 for portfolio without shop up to a top one $250. I looked into the $250 one but it didn’t offer anything that I wanted that the $120 one didn’t.  www.zenfolio.com

As I just touched on I wanted to be able to sell online – doing everything by email is a lot of extra work both for myself and for the buyer. I wanted a shop that was professional looking and that functioned flawlessly. Also, and this is really important, I didn’t want the shop side to spoil the experience of just browsing the photographs. You will never find a watermark on my images for this reason. I think the new site delivers this.

The other big thing that I needed to do was to consolidate my web presence. I was running the blog on this site along with a separate site promoting my book which is due for release in a couple of months. This was clunky and confusing. The new site now houses both the blog and the stuff about the new book. It also has the same URL as the book title which really tidies things up a lot.

So that is about it as far as my reasons for moving – I really hope that you’ll try out the new site theminimalistphotographer.com

Just a quick note about this site (minimalistphotography101.com) it won’t be updated but it isn’t going anywhere. I will host it and keep up the domain payments indefinitely. There are well over a thousand posts here and it would be a pity to just blitz them.

Finally, I post about four or five times a day to my account at Google+  that is where most of my day to day/social  interaction on the web takes place.

See you on the other side

Steve.