The website: beta 2.0

Timing isn't necessarily on my side these days, but today I have some good news. Remember how I included showit sites on my list of favs last Friday? I did that as a way of giving everyone a sneak peek of things to come, without coming right out and saying it. Showit sites are cool all on their own, but when you've built your own, they're even more amazing.

Over the course of the past month, J and I have been working on converting the website we launched in June, to a showit site. It includes most of the same content in terms of text and images, but the way it looks is a bit different. Why did we go to all this trouble to create a website with the same content and launch it less than 2 months after we launched the first one? Indulge me for just a second and I'll explain (:

You'll notice that instead of placing images next to the text, the images have actually become the backgrounds of certain pages on our showit site. And instead of having to use vertical images so that everything is spaced correctly on various pages, we've been able to use the horizontal images we wanted to use originally on our showit site. Oh and did I mention that we didn't have to resize any of the images we included in the galleries and various sections of our showit site? Oh how about how every single page has it's own unique URL with our showit site?


But perhaps the best part about having a showit site, is that we have the freedom to change anything we want, whenever we want to change it. We don't have to wait for other people to do things for us and we don't have to start over from scratch if we still like the rest of our site. If we come up with a new concept, we can implement it into our site whenever we're ready to do it. If we want to add something new, we can add it. Oh and if you're a smugmug member, you can upload images from your smugmug galleries, right into showit so that things load even more quickly.

We've created a site that is so much more reflective of Ashley.Photographer and we're so excited to finally show everyone! Now bear in mind, it is still a beta version because we're not quite finished with a few finishing touches- the placement of certain items and a link or two- but these things will be remedied as soon as we get home. So if you haven't already, head on over to www.ashley-photographer.com and check it out!

Many thanks to DJ, JD, and the helpful crew at showit for helping us to create something we're really proud of!

p.s. I think I just got the record for including the words "showit" and "site" more than anyone ever has in a blog post. And I gladly accept the title!