New website and other time bandits

Just starting work on my new website. Up to now I have been running two websites and a blog, and frankly it's too demanding having to keep all three maintained while trying to earn a living and do everything else I have to do. So I decided that, to make my life easier, and make communication with my audiences more manageable and a little less fragmented, this new site would be a fusion of those three existing sites. This will allow me to do it all in one place.

Reaching the point I'm now at with the new site was an interesting and time-consuming journey. I looked at numerous website-building platforms, both free and pay services. Some were good, some bad, some pure Mickey Mouse and some were downright over-complicated. I looked at Weebly, Webs, Yola, Moonfruit, Google, Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr, Posterous and Squarespace. Yes, it took a while.

I won't waste time describing the very bad solutions I looked at or even all the other pretty good ones, but of the platforms I eventually rejected, my favourite - and a close runner-up - was Posterous Spaces. This is an interesting and, on the face of it, simple concept. One of my key requirements for the new web presence was being able to build separate "spaces" for separate audiences - namely the public, clients and friends. Posterous certainly answered that need: it's rather like a mash-up of a website, a blog and Facebook. For each "space" you set up user access and then post items - text, videos, photos, links etc., as you would in a blog or on Facebook, and then set access settings. On the face of it this sounds great. What let it down for me was that you have to spend a lot of time getting to know the fairly complex interface and really getting to understand the structure. The thing that killed it for me is that users need their own account and you have to search for these "friends" or they have to search for you if you want to share more targeted content - that is, non-public stuff. It's not a readily accessible public space, as the traditional website is, and this was an essential requirement for me.

In the end, I eventually took the plunge and purchased a year's subscription to Squarespace. Essentially this is a hosted platform on which you can build an entire site using HTML, ready-made widgets and even, if you're up to it (I'm not quite) CSS. I am very impressed with the flexibility Squarespace offers. I can build a website, import my blog wholesale from Blogger, build private areas and add all my social media links.

As a video maker one of the most important things was the ability, for commercial reasons, to privately host (ie not on Vimeo or YouTube) examples of my own video work and Squarespace allows hosting of QuickTime format video files. The only drawback is that Squarespace do not allow video streaming from their servers, and those videos will not play back on mobile devices. You could argue: how many prospective clients are going to view the site on an iPad or mobile phone? Probably not many. But as we move forward this is likely to become more of an issue and, what with Flash going into retirement, and QT not being as predominant as we'd like it to be, it will be realistic soon to run the videos as HTML5. So, in the end, unless Squarespace suddenly decide to allow video streaming from their servers, I will have to upgrade my Vimeo account to VimeoPLUS, to run embedded HTML5 video with domain level privacy. However, this will also enable me to embed clean-looking videos, with the player styled to my own requirements. 

With the new site, in addition to streamlining the three old sites, I have been able to add a family and friends area, which is something I've been wanting to get around to for a long time, where I can share things that I might not necesarily want to put on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. I am also implementing a private client area, where my clients can preview works in progress without the fuss and expense of sending something via a delivery service such as YouSendIt or buying a separate FTP space.

So far it's coming on well and with any luck - and a bit of hard grafting - the new site should be ready for launch by the end of the year.

I'll keep you posted...