My First Post!

Wow, this is my first attempt to blog and my first post ever as a blogger, so here it goes, and hold on tight!

Its Friday and I'm really looking forward to O'beer thirty, but I really want to take a few minutes to share the incredible things that I've learned this week on my journey through creating a professional and inexpensive web presence.

This week has been awesome for developing my knowledge on HTML, websites, and slide shows, but what does any of this have to do with photography? Simple, I want my work to be seen in as creative and as professional a manner as possible, but because my business is so young, I don't want to spend a fortune either.

Lets first start with the idea that I know flash is slick and all, but I also wanted a flash page that would allow me to posts HTML keywords etc., so that web crawlers would crawl my site and get it ranked and listed on the major search engines. Next, I wanted a site that was easy to set up, with flexibility and was easy to update. Finally, I wanted a site that was cheap! I found it all here with flashpalette.com. Wow, what an awesome template that cost me around $60, and was a piece of cake to set up, but I did have to pick up a little HTML with the help of the actual site template and the web help page that came along with the purchase invoice. The coolest part about the template was I could download it for free, play around and set up the major portions of my site, then purchase it after seeing how slick it looked. Kinda cool, huh?

Next, I really wanted to figure out how to post a slide show on my website and to eventually post them into blogs, myspace, ipods, etc., but I had no clue where to start. Thanks to OpenSourcePhoto and an awesome photographer Bruce,who was able to message me with a simple but effective way to integrate a show into a template website. For that Bruce, Thanks a bunch and you rock!

I created the show with ProShowGold and exported the native ProShow streaming video format to a super easy slide show set to one of my favorite Jazz singers, Etta James. This was really just a test, but it worked GREAT if you have windows, but for MACs, a solution is coming soon! ;-)

Finally, I used notepad and my dear friend
Google to edit the HTML that ProShowGold creates to help me with the basic slide shows webpage. Once I got the look that I wanted, I FTP'd to my server and wala, I was done!

Whew, I'm blogged out already but my next post will outline how to take an actual video file and create a slide show for your awesome ipod

Until Then, -m