Remem­ber when I said there were changes ahead for the blog? Well, a lot of them are here now that my new blog design is live. If you’re read­ing this in an RSS reader or as one of my e-​mail sub­scribers, I invite you to visit William Beem Pho­tog­ra­phy to see the changes. I’d be very happy to read your feed­back, likes or dislikes.

Blog Design Goals

I had some spe­cific objec­tives in mind that sparked my blog design over­haul. Here are a few:

• Per­for­mance — the site took too long to load.
• Appear­ance — I loved ProPhoto Blogs theme for many rea­sons, but my blog was look­ing like thou­sands of other photo blogs.
• Secu­rity — I had some issues with my Shared Host­ing plan that caused outages.
• Growth — I needed an archi­tec­ture that was poised to enhance and man­age a grow­ing num­ber of vis­i­tors and subscribers.

The Host­ing Environment

The first mile­stone was to move from a shared host­ing plan (actu­ally, a few of them) to a Vir­tual Pri­vate Server (VPS). That change alone enhanced my per­for­mance, secu­rity and abil­ity to grow. A VPS is scal­able, so I can add resources like CPU, RAM, band­width and disk space as I need capacity.

Unfor­tu­nately, the trans­fer didn’t hap­pen with­out some pain. My host­ing provider, which has truly served me well for about a decade now, botched sev­eral parts of the trans­fer. To be fair, I also made two errors. The dif­fer­ence is that I didn’t make the same errors over and over again. Despite some anguish and a lot of time on the phone with sup­port, the web servers are in place and per­form­ing well. I’m still wait­ing for them to sort out my e-​mail, but I’ll live with­out Black Fri­day ads for a while longer.

The New Word­Press Theme

After a great deal of research and soul search­ing, I decided that it was time to move away from ProPhoto Blogs to some­thing else. I chose Stu­dio­Press Themes for Word­Press using the Gen­e­sis archi­tec­ture. In fact, I went whole-​hog and bought the Pro Pass with all cur­rent themes and all future themes. With mul­ti­ple sites to man­age (e.g., I also run Sub­ur­bia Press and Aper­ture vs Light­room, among other sites), it seemed like a good idea to give myself some vari­ety. I tried a few dif­fer­ent Child Themes before I set­tled on Min­i­mum for this site.

The folks at Stu­dio­Press really made my day with their cus­tomer sup­port. You see, they very rarely give any dis­counts at all on their prod­ucts. Buy­ing the themes in one big bun­dle was the best way to save. So a day or so after I bought the themes, they announced a Black Fri­day discount.

Ain’t that the way? I decided it couldn’t hurt to ask if I could qual­ify for the dis­count. Not only did they agree, they issued the refund before I even got their reply telling me about it — $87.50 back in my pocket. They got it back, as I decided to use it to buy another prod­uct from Stu­dio­Press. I’ve been very pleased with the qual­ity and help from these folks so far.

If you’d like to take advan­tage of that same sale, you have until 5:00pm PST today (11÷26÷2012) to save money on Copy­blog­ger Media’s Black Fri­day Sale.

The Per­for­mance Difference

I did some basic per­for­mance test­ing with Web Page Test to see if these changes made a dif­fer­ence or not. Here’s what I found. When using the Shared Host­ing envi­ron­ment and ProPhoto Blogs, the time to load my home page for a first-​time vis­i­tor was 17.241 sec­onds. The time for a repeat view, with some of the ele­ments in cache, was 6.033 seconds.

After the trans­fer to my VPS and load­ing the Stu­dio­Press theme, the time to load my home page for a first-​time vis­i­tor was 5.044 sec­onds. That’s already bet­ter than the cached per­for­mance of my old blog design! For repeat vis­i­tors, the time to load my site was 2.280 sec­onds. Suf­fice it to say that val­i­dates a few things for my plans with this blog design.

More Changes to Come

I still have some issues to update and new fea­tures to imple­ment. There were ele­ments that my old design han­dled dif­fer­ently than the new theme. For instance, my Con­tact page isn’t show­ing the form to reach me right now. My Arti­cles and Review pages used to have a grid to launch into the var­i­ous arti­cles. You can still reach them from the menu above, but the pages need a clean design update to replace that grid.

I’m doing more to encour­age peo­ple to sub­scribe to my email updates, so there are some promi­nent Sub­scribe but­tons on the new theme. It’s a great way to have fresh, unique con­tent deliv­ered to you instead of hav­ing to remem­ber to come back for it. Why not have updates deliv­ered to you, instead?

My Social Media links are very promi­nently dis­played on the Home Page, and there are links to even more social media con­nec­tions on the footer of every page.

My con­tent is also chang­ing to meet my goals. I still plan on shar­ing my images with you under a Cre­ative Com­mons License Attribution-​NonCommercial CC BY-​NC license, but I want to put more empha­sis on shar­ing the tech­niques I use to cre­ate my images. I’ve had requests for more tuto­ri­als, so I’m going to ven­ture more in that direction.

Oh, and there’s one more thing

There’s some­thing that’s been both­er­ing me lately. A num­ber of social media sites allow view­ers to embed code so they can eas­ily share a photo on another site, like their blog, Face­book or a forum. The prob­lem is that those sites get the link back from shar­ing, not the per­son who cre­ated the photo. I decided it was time to do the same thing here and make it easy for peo­ple to share my pho­tos by pro­vid­ing code to embed them on other sites.

Now you don’t have to remem­ber to write any code to pro­vide attri­bu­tion and link back here under my Cre­ative Com­mons license. It’s all done for you. All you have to do is cut and paste the code to use my images. You’ll find the embed code at the bot­tom of each post. It’s going to take some time, but I plan to visit all of my old pho­tos and add this code, as well as pro­vide it for future photos.

I really want your feed­back on the new blog design. I still have a few kinks to iron out, but it has a fresh, new feel for me. I hope you like it.