One of my very first paying gigs for doing Internet work was a project a co-worker called Internet Resources for Christian Growth. This site combined an e-mail newsletter and an archive of the newsletters. This was in the very early days of the World Wide Web and some of the original features and aspects included;

• It was on free service without it’s own domain
• each archived issue was created as a static page using the formatting in the original e-mail
• Their was no search feature
• The images were not original or ideal for the job

If I could change things today I would definitely make sure that the project had;

• It’s on domain name - the shorter the better
• I would set up the site primarily as a blog so that each issue could be sent by RSS and e-mail
• Include a search feature and also categories
• Take custom photos to get the message across better

In a lot of ways I have learned from these experiences over the years. Of course I have always been an advocate of having your own domain but at the time (about 10 years ago) I wasn’t aware of how one could have been redirected to another space. I see a lot of bloggers registering a domain name and redirecting it to a free blog service and at that time for that particular project that may have been ideal. I mentioned custom photos and I have set up a set on my flickr account dedicated to this project I was working on way back then. I hope to continually post new versions of the photo I wish I could have posted on the site way back then.

to spur innovation it’s always good to look back on past projects. Can you think if things you would have said differently? Different images you would have used or different technologies you would have used? Sometimes we want to kick ourselves when we wish we could have done something a different way but how often have you gone back and looked at past work and developed new strategies and workflows? We’re you ever afraid of investing in a new technology because you were worried about the cost only to look back and wish you had taken the leap to explore and use the technology? What will change today?

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 10:42 am and is filed under Compelling Content, Greenville,SC, Internet, Photography, web design, web development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.