A New Conservation Web Site (Finally)

 
Today I am proud to share our new Chesterfield Conservation Commission web site, and it is about time!

Madame Sherri "Castle"

I have been a member of the commission in my home town for over 25 years and for much of that time I have managed our web site. The site has included the basic information that you would expect, including the members, meeting times, and links to our minutes. In addition, I added information about our many wonderful natural lands including descriptions, directions and trail maps. The site has been essential to developing an appreciation of our natural treasures and has encourage an understanding of the importance of their preservation. Although the site was innovative at the time of its origin, over the years it had become a bit musty. It was a constant struggle to keep up with events and almost impossible to get Commission members to contribute to keep the content fresh.




 
For years our site was run on less than a shoe string, and recently, after years of generous support from the Keene Sentinel, we found ourselves looking for a new host. It seemed the proper time to completely redo our web presence. I had recently redone my photography portfolio web site, using the Zenfoilio service. I was happy with the results and wondered whether a site designed primarily to highlight a photographer’s images could be modified to the needs of our commission. It seemed worth a try. The price was right, and Zenfolio solved both our design and hosting requirements. I already had experience with the program and the service offered a two week free trial. Zenfolio had many built in features including, a blog, contact and guestbook pages, and, as would be expected, a robust photo gallery system. Most importantly, for our needs, it provided the capability to design custom pages that I was able to use to shift the site from a portfolio to a full featured organization web site. I created over 15 custom pages that covered information from forest and trail guides to news about activities and events. It was easy to organized access to the site through a series of drop-down tabs that made navigation quick and logical.


A key requirement for our new web site was that it be easily

Blog

assessable to the commission members, allowing them to add and update content in a simple and intuitive way. After demonstrating the program to the commission and providing step-by-step instructions, some of our members are already adding material, although I still have to work on them to maintain a consistent style. Commission member input is most easily accomplished through the site's blog. Using a simple template simple they can publish announcements of upcoming events as well as general information about our activities. Although a polished and graphically attractive site is great, I have long understood that a web site will live or die based on the interest and freshness of its content.

 
The new web site provides much of the same information as in the previous version, but I took the opportunity to add a number of additional features. New Resources and Documents pages provide information on principals of conservation and regulatory rules. There are also links to other resources, such as the Nature Conservancy and the state Department of Environmental Services (DES). We have a new page to recruit and to celebrate our volunteers who are an important part of the effort to monitor and maintain our trails. Of course my favorite part is the photographs, and here Zenfolio's native purpose shines. Galleries of images are organized by forest and can be viewed individually or in slide shows. Included within the galleries are trail maps which are easy to download and print. It is all designed to encourage folks to come and enjoy our beautiful public lands. Finally, I was able to add an audio track to the site's front page. While watching the introductory slide show you will be listening to the riotous sound of Madame Sherri's Pond on a spring evening - and without the Black Flies.

Spofford Lake Gazebo

All-in -all, I found the process of creating two web sites with
Zenfolio to be straight forward and enjoyable. Certainly a lot easier than when I coded the Cheshire Medical Center's site in raw HTML nearly twenty years ago. Given the ease of creating professional web sites with services such as Zenfolio and SmugMug, there is no excuse for photographers or, for that matter, conservations commissions to miss the opportunity to shine on the web.




 

So check out our site. We hope that it will be an enjoyable and informative introduction to the wonders that are to be found in the forest and trails of our special corner of New England.

Zenfolio Web Site

SmugMug Web Site ( Another excellent solution )


Chesterfield Conservation Commission Web Site

Partridge Brook Reflections ( My Zenfolio photography site )


Jeffrey Newcomer
Partridgebrookreflections.com

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A New Web Home for My Photography (Finally !)

Today there is a dizzying number of places to show your photos on the web. Flickr, Facebook, Google +, 500 Pics, and even Twitter all have their own advantages, but it has become impossible to keep up with an appropriate amount of posting and commenting and still have time to actually take pictures. The requirements of shooting and actually having a life dictate that choices have to be made regarding my commitment to social media. As I try to find a reasonable balance, it seems to me especially important to keep my web presence firmly grounded in a strong personal web site.

The Goal
It seems axiomatic that a photography site must be about the visuals. Most important is a beautiful gallery which shows my best work to maximal advantage, organized in collections that allow easy navigation and searching. But the site must be more than a simple collection of images. I want it to inform visitors about my photographic focus and goals and, beyond the usual artistic babble found in most "About" pages, I feel my story is best told in my blog. Finally a site must provide a clear path for those wishing to offer the ultimate compliment of actually purchasing my work. It is a lot to ask, but fortunately there are solutions which are comparative easy to create and surprisingly inexpensive.

Ancient History
After years I have finally update my gallery website. I started designing web sites back in 1995. Yes there was an Internet back

My Cheshire Medical Site 2005

then, but in the olden days "designing" meant coding. It was clunky, laborious work, but, at the time, I found it remarkable to see how a few lines of HTML we're transformed into text and pictures when plugged into a browser. It still seems miraculous to me that I was able to talk the trusting folks at Cheshire Medical Center into letting me design their first web site, at a time when even a single web "page" was considered revolutionary. For ten years, as Medical Center web master, I was fortunate to experience the early development of the Internet and world wide web. I went from HTML editors to Front Page and Dreamweaver, but as the web became more automated and database driven, I found the photography to be a more fulfilling and creative outlet.

 

My Recently Deceased Gallery Site

It was about this time that I designed my web gallery and it has been essentially unchanged until this month. . This was before Facebook, Flickr and the others. The site was a place to drop my favorite images into simple tables, organized by season, with additional pages for seacoast images and a "whatever is left" page for images of our travels away from New England. The site was designed with a ancient version of Microsoft Front Page and had no search engine, slide shows or shopping cart. I displayed relatively small compressed images ranging from 300-430 pixels.  It worked well for a simpler time, but, by today's standards, the site did not portray a polished, professional design and, with over 2000 images, the constantly elongating table format had become increasingly unwieldy. 


Time for a Change
I had intended to update my web presence for a few years, but never seemed to have the time to start over. I was finally pressed into action when my old web host decided to go out of the hosting business. Suddenly I had to find a new home by the first of the year and it seemed the obvious time to make a major upgrade.

I considered a number of options, but narrowed my search to two excellent choices, SmugMug and Zenfolio. Both offer professional appearing web sites with a large array of easily customizable templates, easy organization, social media sharing and commerce solutions that make purchasing images quick and painless. They both offer unlimited uploads providing the added benefit of an easy cloud-based location for my most important images. I eventually settled on Zenfolio, partially based on price, but also for ability to incorporate my blog and the ease of a self-fulfillment option. I expect that I will eventually use the affiliated Photo Labs for many orders, but for now I still like to control the printing and matting of my work. 


Migration
The migration process was surprisingly painless. Both Zenfolio and SmugMug offer free trials.  I was able to get the basics well

Part of my New Front Page

established before I actually had to repoint my domain to the new site. I moved my galleries of old low resolution images to collections on the new site. I also began to process the originals of my favorite images as high resolution jpg's for upload into a "Featured" gallery.  It is this gallery which runs as a slide show on my front page and these images will be the appropriate size and resolution for lab prints directly from the site. After filling in the contact information and the "About" stuff, I copied information from my old site such as the price list and blog index. I am still using my "Blogger" blog, but it connects seamlessly and has a matching color scheme. There is still much to do, and many features to explore, but one of the great advantages of these services is that themes and organization are easy to change without any arduous and costly reprogramming. 

One Page of my Autumn Gallery

Check out my new site and let me know what you think. The address is the same as always :

partridgebrookreflections.com
 
Be kind there is still much work to do. And feel free to turn off the music when it, inevitably, becomes annoying.  If you are considering developing your own web site, it has never been easier, and the results can make a significant difference in the professional appearance of your web presence.

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