stevenclark.com.au

Over the last two days my attention has finally fallen on that domain name picked up a couple of months ago – StevenClarkStudio.com. Most of the summer has involved photography and just as much of it has been in avoiding the building of a new website. It’s small, something whipped up in the bathrobe, and it serves a specific purpose (most of which probably isn’t about making money). It is what it is – including lack of contrast between the grey background and the grey foreground – so feel free to politely point out the aging population crisis and other impairments because I totally agree. However, Steven Clark Studio has launched.

The font for the image replaced headings is Museo, a nice free font that’s quite popular at the moment, and if you have Helvetica on your computer then it works quite well with the body text. Not that there’s a lot of body text going. This is really just a place to put some photographic firsts apart from the jumble of constant shots posted over on Walk a Mile in my Shoes. Both sites have a different purpose.

Lightview was used on the galleries page to provide slideshows of the individual photo sets (never more than three) and I considered doing this on the home page with the four large thumbnails which have that affordance, but seriously the size of downloading the Prototype library for someone just visiting the home page made it prohibitively slow for low bandwidth users. As it is, that page is image heavy, as you’ll note there is a lot of body text in Museo as image (with the text in HTML but removed using a negative text-indent). The H2 headings in sidebars also use a negative text indent to do very simple image replacement, as is also the practise for H2 page titles.

Two interesting decisions, the first being there is no blog. Why? Because I spend far too much time blogging here and on Walk a Mile in my Shoes. However, a hand rolled RSS feed is available to notify potential customers of any new photo sets or free desktop wallpapers available on the website. The second decision was to not call a page Contact but instead call it Sales. Why? Because I don’t really want anyone to just contact me unless they’re interested in these photos or in something about photography. Similarly, you’ll only see a sidebar link to Walk a Mile in my Shoes on some pages and if you look very closely at the footer there’s a tiny text link to this weblog. Steven Clark Studio isn’t really about promoting either of my blogging pursuits.

Sales are primarily through my Etsy site at this point (Paypal only) or through direct contact with me. Why? Because the energy of providing a full e-commerce solution for the minimal (if any) sales this site would ever produce does not make commercial sense. But sales were never the reason for Steven Clark Studio, so don’t be distracted by that page too much.

Another point of interest might be overlooked, but it’s not there as a definitive statement pertaining to the photography. Below those home page pseudo thumbs (which take you to the galleries page) is a block of text that says the following:

Also available, on selective projects, are web design services which include consultation on business objectives, leveraging social tools, site design and construction, internet marketing, website usability and accessibility, and professional face to face advice. There is a world of difference between a web site and a web solution.Steven Clark Studio

This site is to sell my design and art photography skillset but with a commitment to the MBA (Master of Business Administration) over the next two years full time I’m not about to be hollering Hire Me on the corner. However, on selective projects, where I’m really interested it wouldn’t be a bad way to earn a little extra to supplement my postgraduate education.

So there’s Steven Clark Studio. It’s only small, isn’t highly exciting and it’s a simple grey on grey. No website is perfect and to be honest if 24ways.org gets hoorahs for their latest adventure then I’m keeping the grey on grey text here. If it’s hard to read pump up the volume and phone those guys. When you get a decent answer phone me and share the mud.

I hope you enjoy the photography and share the link. Thanks. Also, not fully debugged and tested as yet (as usual) so if you have a Mac issue or something worth telling then a polite email or comment would be excellent.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 10:07 am and is filed under design, web standards, wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.