Well, it looks like my website change is being a bit forced. I had a
braindead moment and proceeded wipe out about 18 months of work. My
backups weren't backing up everything I thought they were backing up
and a particular directory got wiped out. It's not that the stuff is
gone forever, but I have to upload images for articles all over again.
Anything since August 2010 is gone.
Articles are still there, though. Just no images. :(
So, my planned replacement of the website is now into high gear. I've
been ready to redo the monstrocity for quite some time, but this is
being forced a few weeks earlier than intended.
Zone-10 was started as a partnership, but as with most partnerships,
turned sour at some point. I'm bringing it back inhouse, eliminating
the "eZine" format and making it more directly associated with my
photography and darkroom services. There will still be a ton of
information on the site, though. It's getting a half million visitors
a year, so I don't want to completely throw that away. Traffic is good
when you are trying to sell product. There will be a lot of new
traffic-driving content.
Best of all, this gives me an opportunity to switch horses. The site
was built using Mambo right at the time when the developers got into a
hissy fit with the owners of Mambo and forked off into Joomla. I
seriously considered and even heavily tested Joomla, but found that
it's just not a good long-term direction to go with the mobilization
of the web. So, I'm settling on Drupal and I'm building the site in
such a way that I can switch templates to mobile-friendly layouts
without hosing everything like what happens with Joomla and Mambo.
As this rebuild will likely be a five-year committment (or longer),
settling in on a solution with long-term flexibility is important. I
know just how difficult it is to change anything in Mambo without
trashing the site, and Joomla is actually worse. Drupal sites CAN be
built that way too, but you have to really go out of your way to put
yourself in those corners. No solution is perfect, but the new site is
being built to the strengths, minimizing the weaknesses.
There was a lot of soul-searching involved with this rebuild. I look
at other popular photography sites and blogs and see that everybody
has a difficult time monetizing their efforts. It's not just me. I'm
not interested in banner ads for adsense. The new banner ads will be
for my own services and products. The site will be blatently
commercial, but should have enough quality content serving the
photographic community so it isn't just totally self-serving. However,
as my wife reminds me, I have to have it a bit self-serving otherwise
it's a waste of my time. After five years of many hundreds of hours of
work has had very little benefit for my own photography business which
has really suffered as a result.
There will be a couple very specific areas where zone-10 will focus
on. Over the past five years we've been everything from a rumor site,
to a review site of the latest/greatest Olympus digital camera to come
along. This big reviews drive traffic, rumors even more, but have a
pretty fast burn factor. After two weeks, everybody around the world
who has any interest in an Olympus digital camera has read the
reviews, bought the cameras and moved on. Unfortunately, with
extremely rare exception, they buy the cameras through somebody else's
links. If I really want to drive long-term traffic, I'm much better
off doing Canon and Nikon content, not Olympus. There is a reason why
Ken Rockwell reviews what he reviews.
So, Zone-10 is becoming much more focused on two specific areas.
Olympus digital cameras won't be among them. Film cameras, yes,
digital cameras, no. The other area has to do with film photography in
both pure analog as well as hybrid. There is a growth in film
photography with people going into it who have no previous experience.
The bulk of the instructional and reference materials out there are
either archaic or not good for those without a baseline of experience.
So, for the next couple of weeks, you'll find www.zone-10.com to be a
bit chaotic. Sorry about this, but there isn't much I can do about it.
AG
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