Well, I never seem to be satisfied with anything….
So after a very short lived version 1.0beta, AdamDexterPhotography.com got completely revamped. It’s sick- check it out here or just click “home”.

Before(version 0.5-1.0):

After(version 2.0, so awesome):

Something you may not notice, but I know is there. 2.0 is superiorly coded and much easier to edit. It doesn’t use frames to increase search-ability and looks so much better. Also, 2.0 has a sick matching blog template. 2.0 also features an awesome new logo with sweet swirly design.

Here is a very brief “The Making Of” in a couple of screen shots.

First I started with the logo. by picking my font (Birth of a Hero, from dafont.com) and then choosing colors and orientation and symbols…. it was fun. I went nuts looking at different brushes and designs, then playing around trying to put them all together. I sat down one night and worked it out. Amanda gave me some input. After which I started the basic design.

I took a break, came back to it the next day, which allowed me to make some great progress. I actually had about 7 different variations of the main page theme, all with slightly different feels using different images and symbols and effects.

I really didn’t want to do this site with slices because you need to use tables (if you want Image Ready to do it for you) and it tends to load slow, so I made separate files and taught myself CSS 2 through online tutorials ( most of this learning was mainly done when i was making the blog template)- aside from tutorials, I also attempted to reverse engineer http://www.ndesign-studio.com/ - big ups to that site design, it’s sick. That was fun… but really, I learned a lot from trial and error and many frustrating hours, but it paid off with the big A HA!

Next I touched up the other elements, and played around with my demo version of onOne PhotoFrame Pro to get the cool main page frames, then ran everything through ImageReady (except the main page images, which I probably should do in the future) to optimize and conserve bandwidth.

I made them look pretty and got everything set.
I also borrowed a sweet flash gallery from Andrew Berg a designer I found while looking for gallery platforms.

Than after I had all the pieces came the coding. Which at this point was a breeze because I had already gotten the suffering over with doing the blog template. I improved my CSS understanding 10 fold.

Wow, that looks fun.

All in all it took a few weeks and some learning and long nights and one really late night (11pm-3am was the average, but it’s 5:08AM right now, I finished about 25 minutes ago).

I’m pretty tired, so this was somewhat vague and very short, if you have any questions about the site or how-to, I’ll definitely do my best to answer and help you out.

Otherwise,
Let me know what ya’ll think and tell your friends!!!!

I wanted to test out another post to see if my feed is working… I feel like it might be broken.  Great. To make this post worth something. Here is a link. Go there, it’s good stuff sometimes:

 DIY Photography

It ain’t pretty (on the inside at least) but it’s mostly functional.
Star Wars references aside, this is it. The new and official Adam Dexter Photography blog. The skin you see is a heavily modded and edited (by me) Kubrick, with influences from N Design’s Phoenix and Unsleepable 2.0. I like it so far. It still needs a few tweaks here and there, nothing is perfect, but it’s getting there.

So, here I’ll be posting news, recent pictures and work, DIY projects, tips, tricks and hints, and well, anything else I feel like.

Here’s something photo related: I have DIY tips on how to take the perfect Myspace picture here. You better read, I mean, you do want to be ’scene’ don’t you?

But First thing being, completely unphoto related- well, depends how you look at it.

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