New Website Launched Hudson Valley Photographer
So for the last few months I’ve been working on building a new website. I liked my old one, but there were a few problems. First off the mobile version and the desktop version were actually 2 different code bases, so if I wanted to update one, I had to update it in 2 places. That totally sucked, and even got me in trouble once. When I moved my studio from downtown Hudson Valley, to a bit further out, I forgot to update the mobile version of my website. This resulted in a client showing up to the wrong studio space. Another problem, was that while it was good for SEO to have all my portfolio’s seperated by the general category, I felt like it was too much work
for the user. I felt like the user should just be able to see all my images right away. I’m a photographer after all, and the last thing I want is for someone to have to work to browse my portfolio. I wanted something clean, and responsive. Similar experience on mobile, and on desktop.
I also wanted to try out some new tech. If you don’t know, I used to be an software engineer, so I still have a passion for writing and developing software. Photography was my first love, but computers were certainly my second love. I guess now all that’s trumped by my current fiance, but that’s a story for another day. (Man I sure do love that woman, making me smile almost every minute of every day). I also wanted to build something called a single page application. Yeah you can skip down to the next paragraph if you don’t want to read this. So I built a spa on top of aurelia, which is a new framework built by one of the original angular guys. Needless to say it’s a beautiful framework. I initially started out in angular and quickly realized that as soon as I was done they were going to release another version of angular that basically would outdate, and nullify all my hard work. This was pretty unacceptable to me. I wanted to write something that was on the bleeding edge. In this case aurlelia fit the bill perfectly. Hell it’s still in beta. I initially started to host it in IIS, and that just felt like trying to plug a square peg in a round hole. IIS fought me at every turn. I eventually ended up learning a few more bits of tech. Specifically express.js and node.js. I’m now hosting my site in heroku, and I couldn’t be happier. Frankly, I’m really happy that I moved over to express. I never could have done the things that I ended up doing with IIS, that I ended up doing with express. Frankly the rewrite engine alone is enough reason to move. Not to mention I saw speed gains of about 30-50%. Which is awesome. Serving potential clients with my images as quickly and as fast as possible is what it’s all about.
I’m really proud of my new website so if you haven’t already go check it out. Hudson Valley Photographer
