Paying my dues to Picture Kentucky

My first assignment after finishing the 2011 Picture Kentucky workshop was to do a complete re-design of the picturekentucky.org website. It’s the least I could do for a workshop that continually pushes me to become a better photographer, journalist and storyteller.

Some things we didn’t like about the old site:

• The host was out of date and was too expensive. We needed to migrate that site to a more affordable CMS with more design flexibility. We went with WordPress (my personal favorite).
• We wanted better photo play on the pages. Our photo storage service, Photoshelter, has excellent slideshow tools for us to use. We wanted to integrate them into the theme and jack up the picture sizes. Picture Kentucky is, after all, about image making.
• The old site wasn’t designed with potential participants in mind. The new design needed to give the user easy access to information, past workshop details and simple registration directions.

So, we fixed it.

After David Stephenson, the workshop director and my mentor to all things journalism, decided on the theme, it was up to me to implement it. We loved clean feel to the new website, but also the robust design flexibility we had inside the code and preprogrammed theme options.

Feel free to check out the website for yourself. Some pages are still under construction, but overall, it is a major improvement.