New Server and State of the Art Website!!..and perhaps a New Blog Platform.

After a marathon of a few weeks, I’m excited to announce we’ve successfully migrated to new servers AND have designed and launched a shiny new website. It was a marathon because of increasingly complex technical issues from domain registrars to merging two sites into one, as well as a list of small, but nagging bugs and quirks that had to be addressed before the new site could go live, all the while ensuring the old sites did not go down during the process.

Whew - say that 10x times fast.

You can reach the new site via my usual urls:Dean Oros Photography deanorosphoto.com and Images of a Promise imagesofapromise.com.

Thanks go out to the awesome people at Big Folio and GoDaddy. I’ve worked tirelessly with them to help resolve tech issues with the design and launching the new site. Big Folio: high-fives to you for being communicative and offering great customer support to work out the bugs and quirks, even on weekends. GoDaddy offers 24/7 customer support and I find it’s 95% fantastic. As good as Netfirms had been up to a few months ago, when they showed no effort in resolving a major hosting issue we were experiencing with our Evrium web software, we were forced to switch web hosting companies. And though Evrium were unable to resolve the issue as well, they helped with the migration to GoDaddy at their expense which I thought was decent of them, as the problem could’ve been theirs or Netfirms. Evrium acknowledged their customer service had been lacking as of late as they’re busy working on the new release of their product. Netfirms, unfortunately, were not very helpful.

Why?
Anyway, why the new site? After a lot of thought and speaking with other photographers, I decided to merge deanorosphoto.com and imagesofapromise.com into one site. The reason being is that there was an increasing amount of overlap between the two. I also felt it was time to update the presentation of my work, and well as create more of an experience to visitors of my sites.

When deanorosphoto.com and imagesofapromise.com were initially launched (they were launched separately) it was a decision to keep my wedding photography and my commercial / lifestyle images separate, so as not to cause any confusion to the different markets I wanted to work in. “Experts” advise weddings should be kept separate because couples getting married only want to see wedding images, and aren’t interested in seeing other images. The same for business customers who could be busy photo editors who don’t have time to sift through lots of different image styles looking to see if a potential photographer can deliver what they need.

However, my approach to photography is about life and heritage. It’s about people and family, people and business; the world around us. When couples become newlyweds, whether they define it as such or not, they’ve started a new family. Their wedding day is the first day of their new family. So why not present images of families, children, maternity etc., on the same site? They’re all connected.

The majority of my commercial / corporate work is people, people using products or experiencing services in a lifestyle settings: whether revolving around life at home or life at work (aside from fine-art portraits).

So it was a struggle. Maintaining two sites was a lot of work.

Improvements
There are many improvements. The site loads very quickly; more quickly than the previous sites. There’s now bigger images. More galleries. More info. It has soothing music which you have the option of turning off and on. Tech geeks will love it. It can be viewed full screen. It can be viewed on Apple’s iphone. It has an html version for those with computers that can’t handle flash.

The new site is very well organized, and it isn’t intrusive to either market. I love shooting weddings / lifestyle. I love shooting commercial / corporate. The two compliment each other as I bring things from both to the other. It keeps me challenged and allows me to develop and evolve my photography, which in turn benefits my customers.

It’s amazing to me how important the internet is to my business and career these days. I can’t work without it. I remember back in the mid 90s when I first experienced the net. It was sssllloooowwwww dialup (something like 9600 baud rate), but boy did I get a kick at having immediate access to current info.

Blog
The next issue is switching our blog to Big Folio from Blogger. This would mean no more typical email subscribers. But you can subscribe by RSS feed, which is super easy to do.