Re-design of mezhopking.com - my photo site

02Nov06

As I’m sure you’re aware I have another site dedicated to my photographic endeavours. You don’t? Well head on over to http://www.mezhopking.com/ to have a butchers.

I created this site over two years ago now, and I haven’t updated the design or the backend since then. It’s still running on a WordPress 1.3 Alpha installation for god sake! So to say it’s old and falling apart is an understatement.

The reason why I haven’t upgraded the backend is quite simple really, when I first created the site I wanted it to do something similar to rion.nu. At the time there simply wasn’t anything that could do this, well not available off the shelf at least. I found a way around the problem in the form for leaning quite a bit of PHP and hacking a gallery plugin for WordPress. It therefore didn’t work with the subsequent upgrades of WordPress.

Well the time has come for a re-design, it’s been a long time coming and I’m sick of how it looks these days and the constant spam messages that it accumulates… just been through 1800 messages to save 3 legit comments. I need WP 2.0.

I need some help!

Basically the purpose of writing this post is to ask you for your help and ideas on the subject in hand…

I want the same or similar functionality as I have now. i.e. Simple, automated thumbnail creation from uploaded images. Automated linking to the large images from the smaller preview. I would ideally like to use WordPress, it’s familiar to me and I don’t really have time to learn something else. Unless of course what is on offer is amazing or is something that could benefit my professional skillset.

I would also like the ability to have some kind of shopping cart facility… it would be nice to offer any of my photos as prints. I would also like to sell some of my design work on there: Small posters / postcards / badges… you get the picture (no pun intended).

You scratch mine, I’ll scratch yours

If there is someone out there who perhaps would like to do a deal with me, I for instance could provide you with full design / template and you could customise some backend application for me. If this is something of interest to any of you, please drop me a line so we can discuss ideas.

Anywho, I would really appreciate any ideas on this topic. It will be great to hear from you.

Thanks.