I thought It about time I finally got around to posting something about the project that consumed most of my spare time last month. Although connected to photography is was actually a web site  project……the new look website of London based photographer Nathan Pask.

If you don’t know Nathan’s work then I recommend you check him out, he’s got some crazy good photography skills. In fact it’s also worth reading this interview with him on photographywired which was posted a little while back. I’m lucky enough to know Nathan personally and I’ve had the pleasure of hangin’ with him and his homies on a few occasions. Through various conversations about problems with his old site I ended up with the opportunity to give his site a makeover and I have to say I’m pleased with the results.

Nathan has worked in the design industry for quite some time so compared to most other people I’ve worked on websites for he had a very clear vision of how he wanted his site to look visually (and that was both refreshing and at times challenging ). He also wanted something which he could easily update which was not where he was at with his current set-up which was purely a flash based gallery.

If I’d tackled this project a year ago I would most certainly of used drupal, but since using wordpress for photographywired I’ve been surprised and impressed by it’s versatility. I don’t want or need to get into which system is better but I think in this instance where a blog was going to be a major part of the project and I wasn’t having to deal with large amounts of site members and community functionality then wordpress seemed like a better choice and I knew it has a nice easy to use back end for posting straight out of the box.

I guess the biggest challenges were both theming the site and coding the portfolio sections. The theme was challenging from the point of view that I needed to implement a single wordpress installation but have a very separate blog and portfolio style. Luckily this can actually be achieved relatively easily in wordpress using the page templating system and conditional template tags. I learnt a lot of stuff about themes and wordpress that I didn’t know previously during this project but that’s one of the reasons for taking something like this on! (more…)

Today I got home from work to find my wife Chloe and daughter Robyn jumping up and down with excitement and giggling LOTS!!

It transpires that they were watching the well known kids television channel Childrens BBC (CBBC) which is now available to us on freeview after the uber cool digital switchover and it was dress like your parents day! Robyn and Chloe decided to email in a photo I’d taken of me and Robyn during my 365days project and hey presto half an hour later there is me and Robyn featured on the tele! CRAZY WORLD!

Anyway I missed the action but luckily our new digi box has a built in hard drive which allowed us to rewind and watch over and over (and over and over) again. lol!……below is a rather horrible vid of said TV moment of glory captured on Chloe’s IXUS.

Fame at last……hopefully fortune isn’t far behind!