New Website Online...

Well, it's only been 2+ months since I've announced a major change to the look and feel of the main website. The main part of the site has been changed out with a new, less "dark" look with a more modern feel. I've also slightly modified the primary color in our logo after seeing it (the color) in an email advertisement. It really grabbed my attention when I saw it against the 80% gray (or so) background -- so I copied the color :) There is still some more portions of the main website that require work. For one, the Portfolio button is missing until I get that sorted out...this weekend, promise!  Also, the front page slideshow currently only has about 25 photos on it, but when the site is "up to snuff", it should have 200 or so photos. The slideshow is random, so if someone sees a photo they really like, they might have to wait a while for it to come back around. I've done this so that the people who frequent the site will usually have new photos to look at before choosing the relevant portion of the site to navigate to. Let me know if you think it's a bad idea! The new site was also chosen because it's built on a newer Flash compiler that allows indexing of it's pages by Google. This is incredibly important to us because of our SEO. It also allows for each section of the main Flash site to have individual "landing pages". That means instead of having to go to the front page, waiting for the little "loading" icons to finish and then clicking on the site button, you can go there directly, by URL. Here's a small list:

Home: http://www.thefphoto.com/index2.php#/home
About Us: http://www.thefphoto.com/index2.php#/info3/1
Testimonials: http://www.thefphoto.com/index2.php#/info2/1
Wedding Info: http://www.thefphoto.com/index2.php#/info4/1
Contact Page: http://www.thefphoto.com/index2.php#/contact

We are going to set up redirectors as well to make the links more intuitive (i.e. Contact Page will be www.thefphoto.com/contactus). What this all boils down to is that because we are in The Hamptons and provide Wedding Photography here along with all of our other services, we want the search engines to include us when people search for these kinds of services. Historically, the search engines could NOT index the Flash based sites, so people have had to keep "Mirror HTML sites" in order to ensure the search enginers retrieve the relevant data. OK, enough of that!

Since this *is* a photography website, I'll end the blog post today with one of my favorite photos I took this summer. It's a photo of a model (forgot the name..dammit!) that was just walking from the VIP tent at The Hampton Classic...