So, whilst recently working on the National Geographic Explorer in the Arctic, with National Geographic photographer Susan Seubert, she introduced me to a new online company called PhotoShelter. Now, when it comes to websites, sure I've built and managed a few, but I'm no web-genius, and what I wanted was something simple to start, and simple to manage and update. What's more I didn't want to pay the earth, and wanted to have a clean professional layout, that had all the goodies an image website should have - clean easy to navigate galleries that showed my images in their full glory, powerful search engine to search for images within the galleries (that also tied in well with Google and other online search engines), the ability for clients to purchase rights managed images directly online, and the ability for clients to purchase prints online.
Now there are a few online gallery sites that do things pretty well, but there are very few that do all of the above. Researching all of this to decide whether PhotoShelter was as good as Susan was telling me, I had to decide that actually it was. Tie all this to some incredible online resources, like PDF and video tutorials and guides, and a really fast and professional online support...well I'm hooked!
So luckily with a bit of down-time in the UK in between the last ship work in Iceland, and the British Birdwatching Fair at Rutland Water, I managed to spend a lot of time on the computer whilst at my folks place. They would say "What's new!", but it was an opportunity with few other distractions to do some research, and start to put together the new site. And, having just gotten home and managing to remove the old site and do some behind the scenes tinkering, the new site is now up and running! At the moment, it has just images from Iceland, as those were the most recent images that I had access to. But over the next few weeks I hope to be uploading more new images.
I'm keen for feedback on the design and layout, thoughts on any part of the website, and if you are thinking of starting your own similar website, I urge you to take a look at PhotoShelter - click on the link below and with the 'Refer-a-Friend' programme, we both save! Take a look at all the great information, guides, and videos they have in their Resources section. But more importantly, go take a look at my new site - http://www.eco-vista.com!
On a different note, with my last blog being about puffins and other seabirds on Iceland, after being there for three weeks during July, I was interested to see this recent article published by National Geographic News. Entitled "Iceland's Seabird Colonies are Vanishing, with "Massive" Chick Deaths" it doesn't make for cheery reading, and is another sign that environmental change really is happening.
