I spent several hours this afternoon and evening pulling my website redesign together and, to my surprise, managed to get to the point that I can go live.

The new web site is a hybrid with three parts: the main page and one other standard PHP page constitute part one; a new WordPress blog is part two; and part three, the biggest change, is a self contained ecommerce site built around PhotoCart, a piece of commercial software.

PhotoCart looks pretty good so far, as long as you’re willing to do some fiddling with the PHP code, but it has one intrinsic flaw for my purpose: it’s designed for portrait, wedding and event photographers and not really to manage a fine art gallery.  So it has some uncomfortable quirks, like the fact that any particular image can appear only in one gallery.

Some of the design is pretty pedestrian, but I hope in coming weeks to smooth it out some.  My main priority right now is to get the software functioning and available for people to buy prints.

And yes, it’s working!

Now the challenge is to round up some customers.  And, naturally, post some brilliant photography.

photo: A winter day, 2008