Dempsey Williams

It’s been quite an ordeal getting the website and blog revamped for the new year of 2010.  I wanted to streamline the landing page at my photo site (www.dempseywilliams.com) and simplify it.  It was much too busy for my taste but those were the options that my photo hosting company were offering me.  I started to research writing my own landing page in Adobe Flash but with a family and a fulltime job I just wasn’t getting the time I needed to make any real progress.  That was when Zenfolio (my hosting site) announced what their next release was going to contain and I couldn’t believe it – they were already building exactly what I wanted.

I waited impatiently for the release to go live and the very night that it did I started working with the new features/options.  They saved me days worth of coding with that release!  I got most of everything done that I wanted on the photo site so then I turned my attention to getting the blog going.  I started out at WordPress.com but quickly found that they wanted to charge me a monthly fee to have a custom URL pointing to the blog (blog.dempseywilliams.com) but I was already paying GoDaddy to host the site so I wasn’t about to pay somebody else also.

Enter WordPress.org.  It’s a free version of WordPress that you can install on your own hosted site.  You have the freedom to install any themes or plugins that you want and GoDaddy had a 1-click install option, so I went with that.  Unfortunately that wasn’t the end of the story.  It took 3 different techs from GoDaddy to figure out why the WordPress install wasn’t working correctly on my site but, since you’re reading this, they obviously got it figured out.

With a few more finishing touches I’ll have everything wired up like I want it and I can call the remodel done.  Then to get back to some things I actually want to do – like shooting, editing and posting photos.