The last website was built by hand in a plain text editor. I had no idea what I was doing, and changing one thing meant opening and editing at least 4 separate files. This was a whole lot of very monotonous work, and the urge to procrastinate nearly always overpowered the urge to update.
This new site is using a lot of ready made components with lots of advanced content management systems; I’m halfway through uploading all the content and I’m still discovering new features that aren’t even advertised by the theme’s creator, Devin Price.
There is now a master gallery listing of images. Images can be tagged in various ways, and galleries can be created on the fly based on whatever tag you select. That means if I tag things “abstract, 2009, acrylic, Toronto,”, you can click “2009” and see a gallery of everything I painted in 2009. With just one more click, you can be taken from there to a new gallery depicting toronto, or all my strictly abstract work.
I think this is a great addition to the website, because it frees people from the rigid organizational scheme I used on the old site, and lets you search for things however you want to search for them.
As I play around with this website further, I’m sure I will discover more cool new features that have so far gone unnoticed by me. Content from 2006 to 2010 is currently uploaded and tagged, but I still have to go through and update all the information and the availability of each piece. That won’t be a fun job…