Welcome to my new website!
In this inaugural post, I want to share with you a little bit about why I did such a redesign, in the first place and what are my goals for the future in regards to this site.
I’ll dig into some technical aspects behind the redesign, but don’t worry if you’re not interested in this – you are welcome to skip ahead until the section titled “My intention for this space”.
There are a few reasons for this.
First, the previous version of my site was hand-coded by me. This made it cheap and easy to maintain – my only costs were server and domain fees – but it wasn’t easy to scale, and adding new features wasn’t terribly exciting.
I kept this format for 1 or 2 years and it worked fine for a while, but as I am now at a point in which my goal is to expand my online business, it feels appropriate to invest in a platform that motivates me to continually work and expand my website.
This is why I chose to develop my website in Webflow. Even though the monthly costs are higher – almost twice as much (!) – the benefits of developing in a much faster and exciting environment are totally worth it.
I will probably go into more detail about my experience developing in Webflow on another post but, to keep it short: so far it’s been amazing.
Second, I want to keep my information centralized.
Before the redesign, I was hosting my portfolio in one place while my blog and newsletter were hosted in another one.
Again, this was saving me money, at the cost of not having much control over the design and experience of my readers. Not worth it anymore.
Yes, it will be much harder to develop a world-class blog that attracts an audience but I am a tinkerer at heart and I’m enjoying the process.
Lastly, I am planning the release of an online store where I’ll sell prints of my photographs, books and other goodies, and having a website that can help me achieve this is super important.
More details about that in the future.
Currently, if you look around this website, you’ll find:
Now that I’ve published the first version of my site, comes the second phase. So far, this includes:
As the second phase progresses, the goal is to maintain a somewhat regular publishing schedule for the blog and share new client projects as I finish them.
One of the things that excites me the most about this redesign is the possibility of regaining control over how I present myself online, something I haven’t done fully since I stopped publishing for The Arcae Project (an old project of mine).
So, besides all these technicalities, my main hope for this space is to show the real person behind the screen. To connect at a deeper level with people, by being vulnerable and open.
This won’t be a space for harvesting views nor optimizing for retention. You won’t see me publishing AI-generated articles that follow all the SEO tricks.
It took me almost a whole year to come up with the necessary mindset to work on this redesign. Part of this was because I am sick of the way online marketing is done and I don’t want to contribute to it.
Without a doubt, it is a hard balance to strike – promoting your business without constantly nagging people for attention. Luckily, over the years I’ve come across good examples that prove it is not impossible, it just takes a lot of work.
Of course, I am still in the discovery phase about how to do this for myself, but I am looking forward to see how the journey unfolds.
If all this resonates with you somehow, my email is open to you.
