iWeb offers you 27 templates out of the box. All of these themes are pleasant for the eye and some are well suited for photo web sites. The themes White, Black, Modern Frame could be used as they are for your site. If you are happy with that, just upload your content and you are done.

If you want to present yourself differently and want Google to find your page, you need to put a bit more work in. There is nothing complicated about it. Let us start with your site by choosing the theme White and the template Blank.

Start SEO friendly

You will see your page with the navigation menu and a box called Text. Open the inspector and choose the Page tab. Un-tick both Include Page in Navigation Menu and Display Navigation Menu.

Why? Once you are finished your web site, you want to submit a sitemap to Google. Unfortunately, iWeb uses JavaScript to produce the navigation menu, which cannot be translated into a sitemap format. Google needs the sitemap in order to spider your website.

You have to build your own navigation menu, which might sound daunting, but luckily, iWeb makes this easy for you.

Build your own navigation menu

Build your navigation menu, after you finished building your site. Take out a sheet of paper and write down your structure. Let us say, you work with a basic structure like this:

• Home
• Gallery
• Contact

Once you finished all pages of your site, you will build your navigation menu with text links. You use text links in order to make the menu readable for Google. Avoid fancy fonts, as iWeb transforms these into images, which cannot be read by Google.

Open a new Text box and write Home Gallery Contact next to each other or alternatively, you could choose a different Text Box for each. Highlight the text for Home and open the inspector and go to the Link tab. Tick Enable as Hyperlink and choose in the dropdown menu Link to: One of My Pages and select your Home page in the drop down menu below. Make sure to un-tick Make hyperlinks active as this will avoid accidentally opening a link, while you are working on your site. Do not worry. Even if you leave it unchecked, when you publish your site, the links will work in your browser.

Tomorrow, I will show you how to design your navigation menu and give you an alternative to the built in slideshow of iWeb.

Over the last three days, I had an outage on my blog. There were some technical problems from my side, which are rectified now.
Normal posting will continue tomorrow.

Thanks for your understanding.

Last week I decided to apply at Photoshelter Collection to submit my images. Photoshelter Collection orginally concentrated their business on offering an online storage solution for your images. At the end of last year and the beginning of this year, they started what they call Photoshelter Collection, which offer photographer the opportunity to sell their images. Photoshelter presents themselves on their homepage with these words:“We believe photography is an art and a profession, not a commodity. We are determined to restore diversity and freshness to this industry. We believe photographers deserve a level playing field and the majority percentage of their sales. Our community is open and growing by the hundreds every week.” This is very convincing for me, as is their payment scheme. I put a badge on the left hand side linking to my microsite at Photoshelter. I was accepted yesterday, so you want find that many images yet, but the amount of images on that site will be growing. 

I took this photograph of Kgomotso at the beach in a session, where I played with some concepts that I learnt from Strobist. In the past, I would have just packed in my camera and worked with available light. On this occasion, I packed in light stand strobes and lots of courage. For a good part of the photo session, we were standing in water. Not only we, were standing in water, but also the lightstand with a strobe. It is amazing how powerful waves can be. One wave threw over the lightstand and with it my strobe. Thanks for insurance companies… The strobe died a heroic death in the seawater.

Nevertheless, we had lots of fun with the portraits and this image here was taken before the accident. One strobe was direct from the camera right from the bottom up towards the face.

I am a photographer and feel that I need to share more of my pictures as that is, what is all about at the end.

The design changes a bit and becomes more visual and images are becoming a more prominent role in my posts. When I posted the images of the cycle race and looked at this blog, I realized how important it is to come back to the basics. There are a lot of technical aspects in photography today, but the goal is always the image. You will find more of my work here. The technical posts and challenges of using tools to create attractive web sites and getting the most out of available software for the best possible photograph are still going to be around.

I hope you will enjoy these changes and see more of what I actually create, when I write about the technical aspects of my work.