Dempsey Williams

With the Haiti earthquake hitting this week, it’s been difficult to maintain focus on work.  My day job is as a Technical Architect at Compassion International (www.compassion.com) and we have over 70,000 children in Haiti that we provide for.  Over 6,000 are located in the Port-au-Prince area.  The scale of the destruction is hard to fathom.  With all that destruction information is being communicated but it is painfully slow in coming.  At this point we’re still trying to locate our office staff there (40 are well, 35 unaccounted for) and determine the condition of the projects and children.  If you haven’t already, please consider donating to the relief effort – if not through Compassion then the Red Cross.  The need is beyond imagining.

You’ll see this same banner on my blog for awhile.

Haiti Earthquake

As an official test, I’m going to embed some photos and see how the layout works.

Tim and Kara - Small

Tim and Kara - Medium

That works pretty well!  Now onto the next learning opportunity.  WordPress.org rocks!

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.

Over the past year I’ve made the decision to get more heavily into digital photography. I’ve converted my website (http://www.dempseywilliams.com) into a photo gallery and have really enjoyed it. It’s still a work in progress but it’s coming along.

I’ve got so many different interests along with 3 kids and all that comes with that, it makes finding time and focusing on something very difficult. So I do things in seasons. Right now I’m focusing heavily on photography and turning that into a commercial venture – athletic team photos (http://www.dempseywilliams.com/photoordersheet.pdf), senior pictures, etc. – I’m having a blast. I learn something new with each photo shoot. And the trip to Guatemala was huge for my photography skills. I took hundreds of shots and got a few that I actually liked. Check out the photo albums on the site and let me know what you think.