Refine and then refine some more

I received some pretty targeted feedback the other day on my website content and design. Here’s the summary:

Some great photos on your site but the site design should disappear further into the background for me so your photographs are the focus of attention.
… there are too many details I find distracting: the prominent lines in the body, the sidebar colour and the number of words encroaching the image in the centre (the tag cloud).


Made a lot of sense to me. Here’s what I have done to address some of it.
refine

I always knew there was something amiss but couldn’t really put my finger on it. I really like the changed look much better. Its cleaner and even more elegant. Small tweaks but they go a long way…

This Website

So how did this whole website thing start? Let me get to the “how” in just a minute. Answering the “when” is a bit easier. All along, I had a thought to abandon my third-party hosted photoblog (since the company had abandoned it's blogging platform and in turn, me) and build something from scratch for myself - something really clean, elegant, and scalable. It was in mid-July when I finally got serious about putting the pieces together. My wife, Gayatri, was a great contribution throughout the process with her input on user experience, design aesthetics, navigation, and website social marketing. Her suggestion to offer canvas prints for purchase in addition to traditional paper prints resulted in two canvas print orders (here and here) in the first two weeks after the service launch.

Below is how this website got shaped up over the last 40 days or so - in pictures.

1. Brainstorming the website structure
brainstorm

2. Designing the page layouts at a local deli place
design

3. Daily (or nightly) builds of things to-do
todo

4. CSS tweaks. CSS is probably the best thing that has happened to the browser. Well, since the browser itself.
css

5. And the final product as of 9/1:
Complete with a couple of blogs, functionality for buying high quality prints, seamless navigation, tag cloud, RSS feeds and really clean, beautiful pixels all over the place.
webpage
I hope you enjoy your time here. Go ahead, take a look around…