Website Redesign - SVP Gets a Makeover!

When I decided it was time to take my photography hobby to the next level in 2017, I thought I would look more legit if I had my own website.  I had lots of experience building sites for others, so designing one for myself should be a piece of cake, right?

It was so much harder than I expected! I wasn’t sure what I should include or how I even wanted it to look. I researched other photographer’s websites for inspiration but ended up feeling more unsure and overwhelmed than before. I doubted myself at every turn.

I hoped the ideas would come to me if I just started working on it, so I picked a photography-related WordPress theme and added some easy things to it. But the ideas never came, and I didn’t like the way the finished product felt – like it was obviously made just for the sake of having it done.

I told myself it was only a placeholder for the “real” website that I would eventually get around to creating. So, I let it sit untouched for a really, really long time.

Four years later, I finally felt motivated to take another crack at it when I was working on something else. Inspiration is a funny thing – it likes to hide when you’re directly looking for it but will show up years later in a strange place when you aren’t looking!

Sometimes my creative ideas just don’t pan out… they look great in my head, but not so much when I turn them into something real. It’s like those ideas weren’t really meant for me, and I’d pulled them out of the collective creative conscience before the true recipients could. (sorry about that!)

But sometimes those ideas definitely are meant for me… like the one that came in early March 2021 prompting me to make a short video of my favorite nature images taken in 2020, set to music.

I had so much fun making this video – I’ve probably watched it 30 times since I finished it! The upbeat music and montage of moments spent outdoors really put me in a good mood! In fact, it put me in such a good mood, I was hyper-motivated to redesign my website JUST so I had a nice place to feature the video.

I thought I’d go in and rearrange a few items on the site but that felt too much like “putting lipstick on a pig.” Instead, I chose to take the Path of Most Resistance and started all the way from scratch. Using the Divi theme for WordPress, I spent a solid month rebuilding the entire site, and I am so happy with how it turned out!

Thanks so much for reading! If you have a moment, I’d love for you to look around the website and let me know what you think of the new design.