Designing a new website

A few weeks ago I began the process of selecting a new means for building and managing my website.  The previous site will remain available until July, 2012.  The previous site is a bit dated so I was looking for a way to build a cleaner, more modern looking site that would also be easier to keep current.

I looked at a number of host based software offerings as well as web browser based content management systems.  I wanted to be sure the selected system was tightly integrated with a quality hosting service and easy to update whether I am at home in the studio or on travel.  It also needed to have a fast and efficient resource management facility because the resulting website would have a large number of photographs.  

I organize, adjust and manage photos using Apple Aperture.  Some of the host based software systems allowed direct selection of photos from Aperture and that was a big advantage, but they also required me to have my Mac PowerBook Pro laptop computer, Aperture library and the website resource files with me while traveling. Often it is easier to just take my iPad so that favored the browser based CMS systems.

In the end I selected SquareSpace.com.  It is both a robust and fast hosting service and also features a powerful blog/website builder application that is browser based.  Unlike many of the browser based systems, this one supports all the standard web browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome and IE8) and seems to pay lots of attention to industry standards and site optimization for the search engines.

I selected a very simple template with lots of white space and little in the way of distracting background or fill colors and patterns.  I wanted the photos of my work to be the main focus.  Let me know what you think and what I can do to improve your experience even more.  Thanks.