1 - A bit of a new look for the blog, finally moving away from the all pervasive (and much imitated) black 'minima' template that has dominated the scene for a while. Any advice from my graphic designer audience (I know you're out there!) is always appreciated. The black on grey 'Photography' title is a bit troublesome - let me know if you have a better idea.
I've also dropped the fake signature at the lower right of the images, and replaced it with a watermark/logo sort of thing at top left. If I wanted to be paranoid about image theft then I'd plonk a big watermark right in the centre of every image, but I'm trying to preserve the aesthetic quality of the site as much as possible, afterall, for most of my photos, this is as much exposure as they'll ever get.
Another change is a column of ads, hiding away on the lower right, and another box at the bottom of each page for the benefit of google searchers who land on individual posts. I'll decide whether to keep them after a three month trial. The trouble with blog ads is that if you make them unobstrusive, then you might as well not put them in at all. I figure that if I can generate enough revenue to cover the site hosting fees, I'll be pleased, but it's not looking good so far. It'll be interesting to see what the conversion rate from visitors into ad revenue is like - I'm guessing about 2c per 100 visitors, but maybe I'm a bit pessimistic. The reason for this change (I hate ads) is that I'll probably break 1Gb of image storage in three months or so, so that'll require a not-exactly-free upgrade from the good people at Picasa images. In addition to that, I'm also paying for gallery storage for my flash gallery sections, and routinely chewing through around 2Gb of bandwidth for every wedding.
It's nice to be popular, but this game is expensive.
In other news, Twitter is proving to be quite fun, with my followers including Ze Frank, US uber-photographer Chase Jarvis, and Vodafone NZ.
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