Same name different guy

I didn't think this was how I was going to get back into posting on my blog but it is interesting.  After getting some odd emails of support for my 1st amendment rights and some other emails calling for my head, none of which I understood, there was the answer... an email from Mark Byron.  No, not me but another photographer of the same name living in Cincinnati.  After a quick google search there it was: "Mark Byron of Cincinnati gets choice of jail or Facebook apology".

According to the web, during a not so nice divorce he posted something on facebook.  This got him in court for violating a protection order where he was given the choice of jail or posting an apology.  He opted for the apology, like most of us would, and now its a national 1st amendment issue.

So, that's the back story.

I had just missed a call from Mark, so when I called him back we of course did the "Hello Mark Byron, this is Mark Byron".   We both thought it was funny talking to another photographer with the same name.  We have never spoken before but he wanted to see how I was fairing now that this has gone national.   We didn't speak long but we may actually meet up while he's in the big apple doing a talk show!  Imagine that!  Now all we need to do is invite that singer from youtube and we will be all set:)

Just finished the new version of my site.

After 2 weeks of late nights and tweaking and testing, the new version of my website (www.markbyronphoto.com) is up. The main thing I wanted to accomplish was to be able manage my website through Lightroom. Lightroom is a major part of my workflow and being able to swap out images on my site with ease is extremely useful. I'd say I was pretty successful since the pages only required some minor CSS tweaks in Dreamweaver to get the behaviors I wanted but that's just me.

I used a great web template developed by Matt Campagna over at the Turning Gate. Matt was very helpful with any questions I had while working with his html web engine. If your looking for a Lightroom web engine plugin the Turning Gate is a great place to start. Also, here's a weblink to another posting I found that lists a variety of other LR web template plugin providers you should look at.

Probably the hardest thing about the whole process was going through the 30,000+ images in my archive and pulling selects. Why? Well for one, not every image is well... a keeper. Why keep a "not so killer" image? Because you can learn from your mistakes just as much (if not more) than from your successes. I promise to post a mistake here and there to illustrate a lesson learned.

Next on the list was web optimization. This required a few things: creating search engine friendly code(thanks Turning Gate), using image naming conventions, and some Google analytics. I think the image naming conventions are important because it's important that your images get found easily. Personally I prefer Google's image search option when looking for something on the web. It can be a huge time saver. Renaming my images for the web was a bit time consuming. Lightroom was a big help when it came to renaming groups of images. The Google analytics gives me useful feedback about my site from a search engine point of view. We'll see how well it all works once the web crawlers index the new version of my site.