Blogs Welcome to the New Images by Troy website
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Welcome to the Newly Designed Imagebytroy.com Website!
Welcome to the newly designed, from the ground up, Imagebytroy.com. New look, new images, new logo, new content and an entirely new sleek design and faster download times. If you were a visitor of my old site you probably noticed how slow and clunky it was, you probably figured, rightly, that I designed and programmed it myself and that I didn’t really know what I was doing. Well you would have been right if that is what you thought.
This new design and sleeker look and improved functionality is all the work of freelance web designer and programmer Matt Foley of Dropfaith Productions. You can see the link to his website and portfolio in the lower left on every page of this site. That link is there at my request because I wanted Matt to get all the credit he deserved for this site. He did a fantastic job and did it very quickly too. You have probably heard those horror stories of how those big internet web design firms take MONTHS to design a site and how you can’t ever get the designer of your project to answer your emails or even talk to the same designer twice. How the sites are full of bugs and the guys never seem to get them fixed in a timely fashion, if ever. Well not so with Matt. He had this site designed and fully working in ONE WEEK, then it took us part of this last week to fine tune small things that we both wanted for the site and to optimize it for search engines. Matt really works hard to give you what you want in a website from design to function, so he even comes up with new things after the site has gone live.
Matt can host your site and web master it too if you like his packages are very flexible and his rates very fair and competitive. One of the cool things about Matt is he doesn’t insist on being your webmaster nor does he insist on hosting your site. Many of those other firms do. I already had a web hosting service, paid up for two years, so I didn’t need hosting. So Matt didn’t even try to up sell me hosting service. I am also comfortable with maintaining my own site, I may not be able to design and program a site for squat, but I can sure cut and paste code where I need to and I can even write a line or two of code if I have to. So Matt set this site up from the get go so that I could maintain it. He constantly kept ease of maintance and ease and speed of updating in mind while designing and programming this site. His code is well documented giving me instructions, right in the code, on where to put things in the future. This guy is just awesome!
So if you think you would like to have a professional web designer set up your site, then check out Matt’s site and drop him a line and ask him what he can do for you. I think you will be happy you did, I know I am. That sounds so cheesy, but it is true. :)
Keep an eye on my blogs and news section.
Matt is developing something pretty exciting for models who want to have their own websites. What use to be cost prohibitive for a struggling, cash flow challenged model is now accessible with what Matt is developing. Once Matt has this project all done and ready to show the world, I will be providing a link to this exciting concept for models and others to see. Matt is an innovative designer and programmer and I think many models will appreciate what he is trying to provide for them and at a very reasonable price.
This is area is also where you will find special news and infromation about what is going on here at Images by Troy such as specials, new tutorials and galleries posted.
New on the site.
Well now that I have given Matt some of the props he so richly deserves for this site I guess I should get on with introducing the new features of the site and my up coming plans for the site. Again Matt knew about all the things I wanted to bring to the site later and he has built all the tools into the site I need. I just need to start getting the content made up for these new features I have planned.
First the new stuff already here. The blogs of course. Matt set up this blog up so that I can make written blogs, or I can post images alone or as part of a blog, or a slide show in the blogs and even video! Yes, video is one of those things I have planned for the future.
The galleries are all new, all are easy to navigate and fast loading. Again all thanks to Matt.
I have new images to post, some of them shot a year or more ago, but didn’t get posted on my old site because it was just so hard to maintain, due to the fact I did a lousy job programming it. So these images have been begging to be posted and they soon will be and I have many new images to post as well.
Matt has left me lots of room to further customize the gallery section so I will soon be setting up a separate category section for my personal projects. These will be anything that I do in theme shoots that I do for fun and practice, to selected images from portfolio shoots with models and fine arts and image composites that I craft after shoots on the computer in Photoshop. Yes, there will even be some nudes in the personal projects. So if you are offended by nudity I would ask you to please not visit those nude images. I will clearly mark galleries that contain nude work so that you will be able to avoid them.
Of the new galleries posted outside of the personal project category you will start seeing selected images from weddings, and portrait sessions and commercial work.
Future plans for the site.
In the future I plan to add video blogs and I would like to do some video tutorials to help people not only choose a photographer to best suite their needs, but what photographers are actually trying to do when you are in front of our cameras, why we ask you to move to another spot, say at a wedding, most of the time it is for better lighting.
I am also planning video tutorials for the growing population of point and shoot digital photography artists. Just because you shoot with a point and shoot doesn’t mean you can’t be artistic and creative. I will try to show you things to watch out for, the importance of what that white balance setting means and what it is actually for, belive it or not it has very little to do with the color white, how to get more natural looking portraits and how to just understand your camera better and how it works. Another issue I will want to address is file formats and why you always use the highest resolution your camera has.
These videos won’t be shot with an expensive broadcast sort of digital video camera, but with a mid price range consumer digital video camera. All these videos will be done in a relaxed fashion, as if we were speaking on a one on one basis. The low end video camera will hopefully give you the feeling of sitting in my studio and at my computer with me. I will try to give a professional touch to the editing of these videos, but I am afraid time will restrict just how much editing I do. So don’t expect any of them to be professional broadcast style videos.
Right now the site is sort of empty as I work on getting image galleries done and posted and as I work on getting more blogs written. So please bear with me as I start adding content to the site. In time I hope it will be a site with lots to offer and fun to visit.