The first day Joanna and I were in Uganda, our friend, Diana, received a call from the Omaha World Herald. They wanted to interview her about the bakery she started last year as part of her project with The Peace Corps.

Diana was asked to send some photos of the bakery and the women who work there. She suggested that I take a few shots when we visited. We had literally been on the ground for only a couple of hours and I was on the phone with a guy in Omaha, Nebraska negotiating photography that would be taken during our trip.

It was crazy and exciting all at once!

The story has been finished for months but has been pushed back a couple times. Finally, today, it was released. You can read it at Omaha.com.

It was so amazing to see Diana with those women.  By opening this bakery, these women with HIV/AIDS have a new outlook on life.  I’ll let one of the women tell her how it’s impacted her:

Welcome to the brand new www.snaptography.net!

Almost as soon as the last site was finished, I started thinking of ways to improve the site.  Since the .net is my biggest line of marketing I have, it seemed right to put a lot of thought and effort into the completion of the site.

Organization was at the heart of the redesign.

I needed wedding clients, portrait clients, and corporate clients to be able to visit the site and not get bogged down in things they didn’t want or need to see.  If they saw the other stuff, great! but when corporate clients want to see my work, they want to see event or portrait work, not someone else’s wedding.

I didn’t want to abandon the old site’s structure entirely.  I loved that each event or wedding had an individual page that friends, family, or clients could view the photographs and leave some comments.  It’s an extra little feature that acts a mini guestbook and for corporate clients shows their event in a spectacular way.  So every couple, every event. and every portrait session has their own page.

You can find all of those pages in the footer under the heading, “View Your Photos.”  Click on the type of portrait session and the list of events will drop down.

I’m so excited about the blog that’s been added.  It’s one thing that was omitted from the site because I wanted to keep personal life and business life separate.  I don’t know why really, but I thought that my personal life had no business being a part of the business.  Well, that mentality has changed.  My goal with the blog is to let you know what I’m doing with SNAP! but also what’s going on with life in general.  My wife, Joanna, and I are constantly going places and doing things.  This summer we went to Uganda.  We’re going to Colorado for a week soon.  I needed a place to put stories and photos from those personal adventures.

The site is built on Wordpress and the slideshows you see on the homepage and the client pages are all powered by Slideshow Pro.  Slideshow Pro is awesome because it allows me to add videos to slideshows as well.  We recently purchased a digital SLR that has video capabilities so we needed a way to integrate videos quickly and easily.  Be on the lookout for more video popping up on the site.

Finally, I wanted to thank Kate Schmidgall and Bittersweet Creative for the hard work on this site.  Leave her a comment and tell her what a great job she did!