Guy Parkes 6/1/15 Guy Parkes 6/1/15

Gift from a fellow Artist

I am a member of the online photography learning group The Arcanum http://www.thearcanum.com/ which takes the old master apprentice model of learning and teams it with all the latest online tools to create a new old style of education. I belong to a cohort of 20 students under the tutelage and mentorship of our Master Glenn Guy. http://travelphotographyguru.com/

We get set a range of assignments, some compulsory, some voluntary that we can all do at our own pace. There are twenty compulsory assignments to qualify and four formal one on one critique sessions with our master. As we near the end of our journey we are tasked to prepare a portfolio and then host it on a website with a blog.

I was not relishing the website bit as I have studiously avoided website creation all my life and when I made a statement about my struggle in the cohort a fellow student set about helping me by listening to what I wanted to achieve and then went away and created a basic site for me to input into, all without me knowing.

When the sight was unveiled to me it was one of those moments in my artistic life where i was just dumbfounded by the support and kindness of a fellow student http://www.vesaloikas.com/ .

Vesa Loikas your a huge talent and a man of unbounding generosity. I thank you

Vesa Loikas a great artist and a beautiful friend

Guy Parkes 5/30/15 Guy Parkes 5/30/15

This is the original response to Guy Parke's post about not having a website

[originally sent by Vesa Loikas to Guy Parkes via G+ post on May 31st, 2015]

I took your message post very seriously (as you can see in the photo). Your cries were heard across the globe ... so here's your Kleenex: wetfeet.squarespace.com (this site)

Inspired by Jussi Lyons and your photo of him in his Wanaka tree shot - I thought that there's nothing better for you to ease your pain than getting your feet wet, really wet. So I spent a few hours preparing a place for you to explore. This doesn't need to be your final site, I am not suggesting that. But it's technically possible if you so wish and I transfer the ownership to you if you wanna keep the site alive. Otherwise it will expire in 12 days or so. I added your name and email as an administrator of the site, you can take full control and remove me from there - or just poke around and try things. Anyway, the site is up and running. But because it's a trial site, people just looking at it need to type in a verify code - however anybody can look at it, so it's perfect for viewing it in your big screen TV or your small screen mobile phone to see how it adjusts (or doesn't adjust).

Glenn Guy coined the term One Byte At A Time - that's a perfect analogy for a personal website. You start with something and slowly chisel away to make it yours, like a master sculptor with a big piece of rock.

I spent about half an hour to set up this site logistically (register, pick the initial template 'Momentum', verify my email etc.). Then I spent about 2 hours (and two shots of Scotch on Saturday night) working on it and creating the skeleton structure with some blog posts and galleries to illustrate the potential. Today I finessed it a bit further, and now I hand you the keys (info at the end of this post).

Couple pointers - you need as good and fast of a connection as you can get. Mine is 4G at home (with 50 down and 25 up) and this works great. If you have a slow internet speed, editing the site is not as much fun. It's doable, but because editing takes place 'live', it needs fast data connection. The design needs to be tweaked on a desktop. Certain things can be done with a tablet (and you can add blog posts via mobile app), but large desktop is best for tweaking and working on it.

Because it's a trial site, it seems to be slightly slower than a paid site (like mine www.vesaloikas.com ) However, after the site is setup, it's fluid even with slower connections. Of course large images take their time, but that will be the case in any platform. Generally they've done a good job trying to exhibit large scale photos with enough resolution to showcase them well.

I set up a couple of galleries, one bio page, a blog and a couple other pages. Just dive in and see if you can redo any of them to your liking. Please feel free to ask a ton of questions if you wanna dive further into Squarespace. I've been using their stuff for a few years, and I think they are the price-performance-design leaders today (and I create Wordpress sites for my clients charging hourly ... oops). Anyway, just my humble opinion. And when it comes to mobile, this site spits out I believe 5 images so that they are always using the one that fits the screen. This site can also become a full fledged commercial site with online payments if needed. You can also password protect pages to enable access only to certain people which is sometimes very useful. And many other things, sky is the limit.

COUPLE TIPS:
All the magic starts from the upper left corner. There you find all the categories where you can change and edit the site. Changing the actual pages that are already made takes place almost real time. For example, hit PAGES, select one of the pages and hover over the actual page and hit EDIT. This might sound mysterious, but after spending some time with it, the design environment becomes fairly straight forward. BUT, I understand that certain way of thinking just doesn't work the same for everybody. For example editing a WORD document is a pain most of the time for me, but working on Adobe INDESIGN I feel right at home. Anyway, take a dip and see if this is a match made in heaven, you and squarespace happily working on the design of your site.

Then there are always peculiarities, for example 'Gallery style' (slideshow) can be changed in >DESIGN>STYLE options,and not by clicking the gallery itself. Changing images usually require a right click of the mouse and so on. There are options for full bleed, 1:1 etc., autoplay etc. Just try them out. Not all templates have these. The template used here is called Momentum template. I am actually using a different one and they have slightly different controls. However, you can change templates on the fly, which is fun. Just be prepared to go through every page of your site again when you do that. I've done it a couple of times, and then spent two days making it really work. It's like moving, useful but not always fun (but you get rid off the crap that has piled into the corners of your house).

There are a TON of options - but sometimes templates don't let you do things that you want. then you need custom code. Something I haven't ventured into. I believe that at this point it is better to do something close to what you want, and put the time into your photography and content (e.g blog posts) instead of web design. But anything is possible with custom code and there are people specializing on Squarespace custom sites that you can hire.

There are numerous well crafted short videos about the basics f these site. They can be found here. http://help.squarespace.com/video-index/ Just remember, each template has their own way of doing things sometimes.

Here are the keys to your sandbox, enjoy!

wetfeet.squarespace.com

If anyone else in the cohort needs a jump start, shoot me a message and I will help to get you started. I am not affiliated in any way with Squarespace, nor do I get any benefit from this, so this is very much just my personal gesture towards you to get your feet wet and on the way to a personal website goodness.