Hey guys, so I’ve been busy and on break and the recap post on DIYphotography.net just passed me by, however when I was looking at my web stats and linkbacks I tracked it down. I just wanted to extend a belated thank you to DIYphotography.net for doing such a great service to the photo community by collecting and listing all those photo sites of some great individuals! I’ve always loved DIYp and this type of thing is just one of the reasons why. So big ups to DIYp and thanks again.

Also, I propose it would be a pretty cool idea if all of us photobloggers listed each other in our blogrolls, it would definitely help all of us out with visibility and would be a great way to get to know each other.

What do you say? If you’re down, drop a comment or blogroll me and I’ll blogroll you back.

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AdamDexterPhotography.com is currently being featured on Eternal Pixel. Click here to rate it! 5 anyone??

So I’ve been using this amazing elegant and powerful music search engine/personal internet jukebox since it came out in November, and I really think everyone should know about it. It’s called Songza. Just check it out and thank me later.

www.Songza.com

Also, a related, very cool, but slightly less useful website is http://musicovery.com/.

As a person who commented on my blog- www.wefeelfine.org is really cool and a treat visually. It’s important to note the .ORG not the .COM as the .com site is completely different.

Although I liked the look of Berg’s photostack gallery, I’ve since changed it to Simpleviewer (by Airtight Interactive). Simpleviewer offers an overall cleaner look, allows me to make the background transparent and allows for a larger image without the distraction of images behind it.

Adam

PS. I’ve also set up a splash page at adamdexterphotography.com to direct traffic to the correct site based on the type of work they are looking for. (This is most likely temporary and until I can secure adamdexter.com or a more general url).

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!!!!